Global Research

When the ‘pink tide’ of left-leaning governments first rose to power on the back of anti-neoliberal protests across Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the initial reaction from the Left was euphoric. Striving to move beyond the “there is no alternative” mantra, many pinned their hopes on what seemed to be a new wave of actually existing alternatives to neoliberalism. Amidst the revolutionary fervor of social forums, solidarity alliances, and peoples’ councils, it appeared an epochal shift was underway, which Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa optimistically dubbed “a genuine change in the times.”

But in retrospect, the 2005 political mobilizations that led to the defeat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) may have been the high point of the pink tide project. Since then, the balance of power has slowly shifted back toward the Right, with the popularity and efficacy of left-wing governments rapidly diminishing. 

Activists and indigenous community members hold pictures of Evo Morales in Cochabamba, Bolivia in July 2013. Cancillería del Ecuador / Flickr.

Since 2012, economic decline has generated political instability throughout the region. In Venezuela, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) suffered a major defeat in recent National Assembly elections, casting doubt on the government’s future. The Movement for Socialism’s (MAS) power in Boliviawas dealt a blow with the recent referendum loss, which if passed would have extended term limits for leftist president Evo Morales.

Argentina and Brazil

However, the biggest defeats have come in the two largest pink tide economies. The election of Mauricio Macri in Argentina represents the first time a government from Latin America’s progressive coalition has been defeated in a presidential election, while in Brazil the opposition has achieved what it was not able to in the electoral process through an effective coup d’état against President Dilma Rousseff orchestrated by the judiciary and members of Congress.

There is no doubt that the United States is maneuvering to take advantage of the crisis. In contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, its current efforts to reassert its dominance in the region are not primarily via military coups (with the exception of Honduras and Paraguay), but “soft coups.”

Strategies of economic sabotage and shortages, alongside protracted propaganda campaigns and scandals in media and social networking sites are generating a climate of fear, desperation, and instability. All this is paving the way for the Right to deliver the final blow through institutional mechanisms like judiciaries, elections, and in the case of Venezuela a recall referendum that would cut short the presidency of Nicolás Maduro.

Nonetheless, it is insufficient to invoke imperialism to explain the crisis facing the Latin American left. Previously, when opposition forces had attempted to overthrow left-wing governments through coups d’état in Venezuela in 2002, Bolivia in 2008, and Ecuador in 2010, popular support for these governments was sufficient to resist pressure from the Right. This was despite economic sabotage and fierce opposition from the mass media. By contrast, today these governments have much weaker defenses against attacks from the Right.

To understand the current crisis, the Left must also look inwards. The current political and economic crisis is also about the limitations and structural contradictions inherent in the project of the pink tide itself, which have increasingly undermined its radical goals.

Challenging Neoliberalism

The left-wing governments which together comprised the pink tide – including Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and to a less radical extent Brazil and Argentina – first achieved electoral victory on the back of widespread popular discontent about the effects of neoliberalism. Accordingly, the main thrust of their project was anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal.

In response to massive popular mobilizations, these governments softened the harshest blows dealt by neoliberalism, reversing privatizations, promoting growth based on production rather than speculation, recuperating the role of the state in wealth redistribution, and expanding public services, especially in health care, food, and education.

The initial objective was to build an alternative hegemonic bloc capable of breaking with U.S. hegemony and the neoliberal world order. The shared goals of alternative forms of industrialization, trade, finance, and communications were accompanied by important efforts toward integration through initiatives such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Carribean States (CELAC). The most interesting of these projects was the Venezuelan initiative, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which sought alternative forms of cooperation based on the principles of complementarity and solidarity.

There is no doubt that the social programs of pink tide governments brought significant gains for poor and working people. Many for the first time gained access to basic goods, housing, higher education. and health care.

With the possible exception of Venezuela, the reforms of progressive governments were only designed to confront U.S. hegemony and mitigate the effects of neoliberalism. They did little to challenge the more fundamental structures of capitalism in these countries. The main targets for nationalization were foreign assets, while the structures of power within Latin American countries were mostly left intact.

Social programs sought only to assist the poor, but they refrained from compromising the rich. There was no significant agrarian reform, and major resources like mining, agro-industry, finance, and mass media remained in the hands of a small sector of elites, who continued to profit under pink tide governance. As a result, as the pink tide project unfolded it was increasingly undermined by its own contradictions.

Neo-Developmentalism

The key defining characteristic of the pink tide’s economic strategy was the neo-developmentalist model. This was an updated version of the import-substituting industrialization model promoted by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in the postwar period designed to help Latin American countries break North-South dependency and regain national sovereignty.

Brazil, Argentina, and Ecuador attempted to reduce dependence on foreign capital by promoting local entrepreneurship and forging alliances with their “national bourgeoisies.” But subsidies to business owners failed to promote investment in ways that could support the goals of national development or economic diversification. Throughout the pink tide countries structural economic imbalances persisted, leading these countries to depend even more on raw material exports to fuel economic growth and fund social welfare programs.

Indeed, the increasing dependence on natural resource extraction has been the most problematic aspect of pink tide development strategies. Although the extractivist model was defended by governments as a necessary “stage” of development to move toward a more advanced economy, in fact the opposite has been true.

The “reprimarization” of economies has further restricted their productive base and locked them into a path of dependency on raw material exports. Despite attempts to implement neo-developmentalist strategies for channeling agro-mineral rents into alternative productive activities, these projects never got off the ground.

The most significant geo-economic change associated with the primary-export-led growth strategy has been the increase in ties with China. But these new trade links have been neither able to provide the basis for regional sovereignty nor break the logic of dependence. Rather, trade with China has brought new forms of subordination, reinforcing primary commodity export-led growth with very little transfer of technology.

But perhaps the biggest problem with the extractivist model is its association with a highly undemocratic concentration of power and resources, characterized by structural unemployment on the one hand, and wealth accruing in the hands of a small stratum of investors and multinational corporations on the other.

The extractivist growth model has in fact prevented the possibility of any further progressive change, instead encouraging a deeper penetration of capital into Latin American territories. Critics describe this model as “predatory capitalism” because the costs of economic growth are placed on natural resources and rural communities, dispossessing peasants and indigenous peoples and precipitating ecological disaster. This has generated a new cycle of territorial struggles against extractive projects.

As a result, despite making significant gains in social welfare, pink tide governments have been unable to overcome the tensions inherent in this growth model. They had dealt a blow to the “new world order” represented by U.S. imperialism and neoliberal globalization by blocking free-trade agreements and reversing privatizations. But in the end, the pink tide governments never extended their mission to that of transcending capitalism as such. Instead they accommodated to it, deepening their dependence on global capital.

What’s more, extractivism increased governments’ vulnerability to boom-bust cycles. Plummeting commodity prices – a result of declining growth in China, reduced demand for agro-fuels, and the development of shale and other substitute oil – have been devastating to pink tide economies, leading to reduced or negative rates of growth, currency devaluations, and declining fiscal resources. The region now faces its fourth year of economic decline. Meanwhile, very few alternative trade and industrialization goals have been achieved, compounding economic stagnation.

Transformation Undermined

There is no doubt that the extractivist model provided pink tide governments with the rents necessary to implement significant welfare programs. But unaccompanied by a more radical project for structural transformation, these social programs have only been a temporary solution; the systemic mechanisms which reproduce inequality and social exclusion are left intact.

The absence of a broader project for transforming society and social consciousness has limited the effectiveness of social programs. In Argentina, food emergency plans and soup kitchens were set up to provide life support to the most impoverished sectors of the population during the economic crisis. But they were unable to tackle the underlying structural causes of poverty in the long run. After the initial emergency these programs were never replaced by efforts to organize alternative livelihoods for people beyond the mold of individual consumption.

Emptied of their radical potential, social assistance programs became mechanisms for co-opting popular sectors and social organizations. The Kirchners’ unemployment schemes were used as a tool to divide and conquer the piquetero movement. “Loyal” activists were rewarded with official positions and resources, while those more critical were isolated. The result of these clientelistic practices was the depoliticization, demobilization, and delegitimization of the movement.

In Brazil, the rise to power of the Workers’ Party (PT), was associated with the dissolution rather than activation of left-wing social forces. The PT’s relationship with movements was primarily defined by the appointment of leaders from unions, social organizations, and NGOs to public administrative positions. But this meant that activists and progressives left the ranks of popular leaders to form part of the elite, resulting in a loss of popular legitimacy. The Left was disoriented and deactivated, unable to form an independent political stance.

Across the board, social programs were not accompanied by new forms of popular education, mobilization, unification, and political formation. The role of the poor was to act as passive beneficiaries of social programs rather than radical political subjects. They were inserted into “consumer society” but were not part of a project seeking to challenge that form of society or transform social consciousness. This has thwarted the possibility of building toward postcapitalist societies.

As a result, the political horizon of the pink tide project was limited to a temporary increase in consumption capacity for poor and working people. While this was most clearly evident in Brazil and Argentina, a similar dynamic also evolved in the more radical projects of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

The commodity price slump has laid bare these contradictions in the pink tide project. Governments are no longer able to fulfill their dual role as both facilitators of higher profits for capital and benefactors for the poor. And in the absence of a more radical strategic vision to confront capitalism through popular mobilization, governments have retreated to the right, implementing pro-market reforms in response to economic stagnation.

In Brazil, Rousseff cut back social policies and appointed a liberal finance minister. In Ecuador, Correa’s initial attempts to increase tax revenues and social programs were curtailed and he was eventually forced to increase public debts and exports, and award oil concessions to large corporations. Meanwhile, the governments’ market-friendly policies and strategic alliances with sectors of the elite caused confusion amongst their popular base.

Rising Tensions

The limited political horizon of the pink tide project fostered tensions between governments and social movements. Governments were unable to establish relationships with movements that allowed the latter to maintain their autonomy whilst opening up to self-criticism and holding constructive dialogue when protest arose.

The proposed societal transformations of Bolivia and Ecuador have been emptied of their radical content. In Ecuador, the popular mobilizations and constituent assemblies reached a high point in 2008, when the rights of nature were recognized in the Constitution and buen vivir – “living well,” an alternative vision of development based on the cosmovisions of ethnic groups and the principles of ecology – was incorporated into the national development plan.

But in practice, these goals were always subordinated to the neo-developmentalist growth strategy, as demonstrated last year when Correa abandoned the Yasuní Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) initiative to keep oil in the ground in favor of opening drilling operationsin the Yasuní national park.

Ecuador’s extractivist growth model has heightened the tensions between the Correa government, which has become increasingly top-down, and popular protests of peasant, indigenous, and environmentalist movements. Movements organized marches and petitions against the government’s expansion of agribusiness and mining, as well as the criminalization of social protest. The government’s hostility to these protests ended up providing an opening for the Right, which took the opportunity to mobilize against higher taxes with the ultimate goal of restoring the conservative government.

Similarly, in Bolivia the MAS’s appeal to “plurinationality” and “pluriculturalism” emphasizes the issues of identity and values for indigenous peoples primarily through legal recognition, but pays insufficient attention to the material conflicts arising for these communities within the national development strategy.

The model of “Andean-Amazonian” capitalism acknowledges the coexistence of diverse cultural-economic modes within Bolivian society: the ayllus, the family, the informal sector, small business, as well as national and transnational capital. But again, the practical experience of conflict between these sectors over infrastructure and mining projects would appear to demonstrate the dominance of the latter two.

When the highway proposal for the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) was pushed through despite popular protests, the Bolivian government was accused of intimidating, dividing, and criminalizing indigenous organizations. Social movements have been weakened in the face of divisions over popular protests, suffering a loss in autonomy and militancy. In this context, the project risks becoming not one for promoting radical activation, but for accommodating social forces to the demands of capital accumulation.

Governments too focused on the economic agenda and technocratic state administration have lost their relationship with autonomous, organized social sectors. Mass protests against the PT in Brazil in 2013 started as left-wing demands concerning public transport. However, the party’s disregard for these popular demands opened the doors for the right-wing media and upper middle classes to seize the opportunity to mobilize the discontent, which eventually became a major force behind the toppling of the government in 2016.

It has become evident that the social mobilizations that initially brought pink tide governments to power have had little continuity. This is partly because they lacked a long-term project to become a self-sustaining force, but also because they were undermined by the agendas of their governments. Even if activism has not disappeared completely, it is nonetheless the case that forces on the Left are a far cry from constructing a clear project to build an alternative hegemonic force.

The result is that social forces on the Left were unprepared for the current economic crisis. While governments made alliances with the Right and adopted pro-market policies, popular forces lacked the capacity to understand what was happening and mobilize for a popular alternative. Absent a strategy to push for a radical exit from the crisis, in both Brazil and Ecuador movements criticizing governments ended up promoting the cause of the Right.

What these experiences make clear is that a project for societal transformation cannot be limited to greater social redistribution without also seriously confronting deeper power structures and building a radical popular base. It is not that greater access to basic goods, education, and health are unimportant, but that their effectiveness does not fundamentally alter the reproduction of class and power inequalities.

Nor do they necessarily encourage the mobilization, education, and political formation necessary for a longer-term transformative project. It is not enough to defeat neoliberalism without also having a transitional strategy toward a postcapitalist society.

Venezuela’s Example

Venezuela is the only country that attempted to go beyond the post-neoliberal project, paving the way toward a postcapitalist society. Following the coup attempt and the oil strike of 2002, Hugo Chávez realized that his social agenda could only move forward if it turned in a more radical direction on the basis of popular participation. Chávez’s vision of “twenty-first-century socialism” sought to construct a communal state accompanied by revolutionary activism and popular protagonism.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Missions are an extensive set of social programs tackling a range of issues from poverty reduction, food, housing, education, and health care to indigenous rights. But more important than material redistribution in Venezuela has been the attempt to transform popular political culture, with a surge in grassroots organization, class consciousness, and popular mobilization.

The Bolivarian Missions have been accompanied by new mechanisms for political participation. Community councils have empowered people to make decisions on a variety of issues in their everyday lives, from health to water and transport. There is no doubt that elements of these processes demonstrate a radicalism that sets them apart from those of the rest of the pink tide, promoting the activation of popular forces outside the state bureaucracy and the transformation of social consciousness.

Yet the limitations of Venezuela’s project for socialism still lie in the structural contractions of the process. Throughout the Venezuelan process there has remained a major contradiction between the expansion of popular protagonism and the failure to accompany these processes with fully socialized productive property.

The nationalization of oil and other industries represented important steps in precipitating a rupture with capitalism and bringing the economy under social control. But these projects were often carried out as an immediate response to conflict and were not part of a broader strategic plan for societal transformation.

Moreover, the project would always be limited by its inability to escape the extractivist model that, as described above, is inherently undemocratic. Despite major attempts to channel oil funds to diversify the economy through a system of cooperatives, these lacked the capacity to become self-sustaining independently of the government subsidies that propped them up.

Dependency on subsidized imports for food and other basic goods left the top-down rentier model intact. With no economic diversification, local business remained dedicated only to imports rather than productive industry. This has limited real popular participation. Despite a significant surge in popular protagonism, the fact that these new forms of organization had no foundation in the productive relations of Venezuelan society meant they were unsustainable. Social transformation was mainly limited to the political sphere, taking place only at the local level with no foundation in the productive base of the economy.

This means that it is still top-down decisions made by the state and in the world market that will ultimately impact people’s livelihoods. In Venezuela this top-down model has been accompanied by an extensive corruption of state bureaucrats that popular mobilization could not overcome.

These underlying contradictions have been unveiled by the current economic crisis. When oil prices plummeted they took with them the access to food and medicine for the poorest sectors of society. Even if the horror stories presented in the mainstream media of famine, desperation, and the failure of socialism are politically motivated exaggerations, there is nonetheless no doubt that the Venezuelan project has proven unsustainable.

Like his counterparts, Maduro has desperately turned to Canadian mining companies to make up for the shortfall in dollars. The hope for Venezuela lies in the continued empowerment of popular classes, who have mobilized bottom-up solidarity initiatives like communal networks for production and consumption of basic goods to confront the crisis.

Left Neoliberalism

The experience of left-wing governments in power is representative of the problems of trying to “humanize” capitalism, or build an “Andean-Amazonian” capitalism without going beyond it. Despite a fierce anti-neoliberal platform, with the exception of Venezuela few steps were taken toward a complete rupture with the previous order.

Instead, the result was what some described as “left neoliberalism,” whereby the new governments continued to manage a post-neoliberal society but were not able to overcome capitalism. So far, they have been successful neither in preventing the contradictions of the operations of global capitalism in Latin America from erupting into crisis, nor in preparing the masses to organize and propose their own solutions going forward. This must change if these governments are to retain their hold on power.

In the face of crisis, people want change. Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera has pointed out that the Right has no alternative proposal. The neoliberal policies they propose resemble those implemented in the 1980s and 1990s that initially caused economic devastation and popular protest. Yet after over a decade in power, the pink tide governments seem unable to move beyond the impasse and provide an alternative to the economic woes facing the people.

Rather than implementing pro-market policies and making pacts with sectors of the elite, the key is to push for a solution to the crisis by increasing popular protagonism through mobilization, unification, and education. In the face of crisis, the popular sectors must be prepared to build toward another type of society.

This involves strengthening political consciousness and collective organization to protect the social gains made under progressive governments, but also providing greater space for social activism to limit the expansion of capitalism, and building a social and ecological economy beyond extractive capitalism.

This cannot be achieved simply by spontaneous self-activity, but nor can it come from technocratic decisions from above. Political parties must open up to self-criticism and national-level debate with popular movements about the type of social, ecological, and economic model people need, that will have a real impact on the party’s program. The primary task is to steer away from extractivism toward a socialized economy that is ecologically sustainable.

An important example of a left alternative is emerging from the continent-wide ALBA social movements project. The goal of ALBA movements is the construction of a continental social movements network in order to mobilize, unify, and educate diverse sectors of the popular movement around a common project, from peasant, indigenous, and African communities to students, workers, and co-operatives.

ALBA’s response to the current conjuncture is to build toward “the creation of an alternative proposal based on popular power” which “seeks a solution [to the crisis] in accordance with the interests of popular organizations.” This means precipitating the struggle for the construction of an alternative, postcapitalist economy that can be “socialist, ecological, communal, feminist, and self-sustaining.”

In the face of an exhausted model, processes like ALBA will be critical to building “political subjects” capable of acting as forces of radical change. The pink tide governments may have failed to tame capitalism, but what the Peruvian journalist and socialist activist José Carlos Mariátegui envisioned as “the socialism of our Americas” is still a project worth fighting for. •

Kyla Sankey is a Toronto-based activist and political commentator. She is a Ph.D. candidate in human geography at the University of Toronto. This article first published on the Jacobin website.

His August 15 foreign policy address in Youngstown, OH showed he’ll govern as an establishment leader if elected in November – continuing dirty geopolitical business as usual vital to end once and for all.

He’ll wage endless wars to “defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” he said – without explaining its US creation and support at least since the 1980s in Afghanistan against Soviet Russia.

Bin Laden was a Pakistani intelligence-recruited CIA asset. Obama didn’t kill him. He died of natural causes in December 2001, widely reported at the time.

Earlier mujahideen fighters are today’s Taliban, Al Qaeda, Nusra Front, ISIS, Boko Haram and similar groups – created, supported and used by America as imperial foot soldiers to do its killing and dying where they’re deployed with the aim of replacing sovereign independent governments with US puppet regimes.

America isn’t at war with “radical Islamic terrorism.” It actively supports it as an instrument of US imperial foreign policy.

Obama and Hillary didn’t create today’s deplorable geopolitical landscape. They exacerbated decades earlier policy – begun under Jimmy Carter, continued under Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush II to today, certain to go on seamlessly under duopoly governance no matter who succeeds Obama.

Today’s gravest issue is systemic – neocon infested Washington bent on world dominance, doing whatever it takes to accomplish its objective, color revolutions and wars its strategies of choice.

Will Trump as president change things? No. Will he differ from another Clinton co-presidency? Only by being less likely to start WW III if he follows through on wanting better relations with Russia.

If he continues waging imperial wars on the phony pretext of combating terrorism, US/Moscow geopolitical policies will be intractably at odds.

“ISIS…operat(es) in 18 countries with aspiring branches in 6 or more for a total of 24, and many believe it is even more than that,” said Trump.

Fact: ISIS operates where US policymakers deploy their fighters, under commanders chosen by CIA and Pentagon officials – recruited, armed, funded and directed by America, NATO, Israel and other regional rogue states.

Fact: The way to defeat ISIS and other radical Islamic groups is stop supporting them. They can’t exist without foreign backing.

Instead of diverging from America’s imperial agenda if elected president, Trump could exacerbate it by belligerence  against all nations where he says ISIS exists.

He’ll continue drone wars, mostly killing noncombatant men, women, children, the elderly and infirm threatening on one.

He’ll maintain Guantanamo (and likely America’s global torture prison network) instead of shutting it down. He’ll introduce ideological screening tests to suspend immigration from certain countries.

He claims wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were mistakes he opposed after supporting them earlier. He called failure to seize Iraq’s oil fields poor judgment. “In the old days when we won a war, to the victor go the spoils,” he blustered.

He failed to explain all wars violate core international, constitutional and US statute laws without Security Council authorization. US presidents and Congress have no right to wage them without it – especially against nations posing no threat to America or any other countries.

All ongoing US direct and proxy wars are illegal acts of aggression. Trump promised to continue them – justified by pledging to combat radical Islamic terrorism America supports.

US war on humanity will continue no matter who succeeds Obama. Prospects for world peace and stability are nonexistent – a deplorable situation threatening everyone.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Though there has been remarkably little discussion of the subject in the Western media, Russia last week quietly acquired for the first time in its modern history a proper permanent base in the Mediterranean.

That the Syrian government has wanted to grant the base to Russia on a permanent basis has been known for some time.  From the Syrian point of view the Russian base not only guarantees Russia’s support for the present Syrian government but also provides Syria with a measure of protection it has never had before from Israeli air incursions.  These have been a continuous reality for decades with Syria lacking the capability to prevent them.  The Russians do have that capability and the Syrians will be hoping that because of the presence of the base they will now use it to protect Syria from Israeli air incursions.  As it happens reports suggest that the number of Israeli incursions of Syrian airspace have fallen off significantly since the Russian Aerospace Forces deployed to Syria last autumn, with the Israelis now careful to keep the Russians informed of their flights.

Whilst the Syrian government is known to have been keen to grant Russia a permanent base, the Russians have up to now been less sure.  Establishing a permanent foreign base in Syria is for the Russians a major departure from their former policy given the Russian military’s overwhelming focus on defending Russian territory rather than projecting Russian military power far beyond Russia’s borders.

Some Russian military officials are also believed to have questioned the military utility of a Syrian base, pointing out that the eastern Mediterranean where the base is located is well within the range of Russian ballistic and cruise missiles.  Importantly, judging from comments he made in December last year, one of the leading skeptics was none other than Putin himself:

“about the base, opinions differ, you know. Some people in Europe and the US repeatedly said that our interests would be respected, and that our [military] base can remain there if we want it to. But I do not know if we need a base there. A military base implies considerable infrastructure and investment.

After all, what we have there today is our planes and temporary modules, which serve as a cafeteria and dormitories. We can pack up in a matter of two days, get everything aboard Antei transport planes and go home. Maintaining a base is different.

Some believe, including in Russia, that we must have a base there. I am not so sure. Why? My European colleagues told me that I am probably nurturing such ideas. I asked why, and they said: so that you can control things there. Why would we want to control things there? This is a major question.

We showed that we in fact did not have any medium-range missiles. We destroyed them all, because all we had were ground-based medium-range missiles. The Americans have destroyed their Pershing ground-based medium-range missiles as well. However, they have kept their sea- and aircraft-based Tomahawks. We did not have such missiles, but now we do – a 1,500-kilometre-range Kalibr sea-based missile and aircraft-carried Kh-101 missile with a 4,500-kilometre range.

So why would we need a base there? Should we need to reach somebody, we can do so without a base.

It might make sense, I am not sure. We still need to give it some thought. Perhaps we might need some kind of temporary site, but taking root there and getting ourselves heavily involved does not make sense, I believe. We will give it some thought.”

These comments, whilst carefully leaving the option open, suggest a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the idea of a permanent base and an ongoing debate on the subject within the Russian leadership.  Presumably it was these doubts and this debate that held up ratification of the base agreement for so long.  It is clear that that debate has now been settled, with the agreement finally ratified and with the decision finally made to make Khmeimim into a permanent base.

It should be said clearly that this is a major shift.  Tsarist Russia did operate naval bases in the Greek islands and in Piedmont in Italy in the nineteenth century, and the USSR negotiated naval and air facilities at various times with Albania, Yugoslavia, Syria and Egypt, which however all fell well short of being true permanent naval and air bases.  The USSR did seek at the end of the Second World War Western agreement for a Russian base in Libya, but unsurprisingly this was refused.

All these previous projects proved ephemeral or stillborn, with whatever temporary arrangements the Russians negotiated with the various Mediterranean powers always reversed whenever these powers realigned towards the West, as they invariably did.  The one exception was the Russian naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartus which dates back to 1971.  Though it has attracted huge attention during the Syrian conflict, like all the other facilities the USSR acquired in the Mediterranean during the Cold War it is in no sense a base.  As even the BBC has been obliged to admit, the facility at Tartus is at best a support and resupply station for Russian ships in the Mediterranean.  It is too small to host Russian naval warships of frigate size and upwards, and has no facilities to host large numbers of Russian sailors or personnel such as a true base would need to do.

The military reality is that since 1943 it is the US Navy which together with its naval allies (primarily Britain and France) has been the overwhelmingly dominant military power in the Mediterranean.  Since the Second World War the Mediterranean has been in military terms an American lake.

The base at Khmeimin however is different from anything that has existed before.  Not only does it already host a formidable strike force of aircraft roughly equivalent to that of a US Navy carrier strike group, but it is heavily defended by formidable air defence assets including S400, BUK and Pantsir anti aircraft missiles, and contains a host of radar, electronic warfare and command facilities.  It is also defended by a formidable force of Russian ground troops, said to be of battalion strength.  Moreover there is talk the base is going to be significantly expanded to make it capable of hosting much heavier strike aircraft, possibly TU22M3s.  Khmeimim also forms part of what is becoming a very powerful complex of Russian military bases and facilities in Syria, which obviously include the Tartus naval facility (which may also now be expanded) and a top secret Russian listening post which has long been rumoured to exist somewhere in Latakia province.

In aggregate this is a base complex of a sort the Russians have never had in the Mediterranean before, and one that has now been made permanent.

The Russian base in Syria cannot challenge the supremacy of the US Navy in the whole of the Mediterranean area.  However it does have the potential to change drastically political and military perceptions in its eastern half.  There is now the prospect of Russian fighters flying over the eastern Mediterranean in regular patrols, monitoring US warships and aircraft in the area, and making Russia’s presence felt in the area as it has never been felt before.  It is one thing to know in the abstract that Russian ballistic and cruise missiles can reach this area.  It is quite another actually to be able to see Russian military aircraft physically present there.  The psychological and political impact on the countries that border the eastern Mediterranean (Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon and Israel) and on the US Navy (in an area where it has long been accustomed to sailing unchallenged) cannot be overstated, and would be tremendous.

All this of course depends on the eventual outcome of the conflict in Syria.  By establishing a permanent base there Russia has just raised the stakes, a fact that undoubtedly explains the intensity of the conflict.

In January 2013, during the military trial of five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, a defense lawyer was discussing a motion relating to the CIA’s black-site program, when a mysterious entity cut the audio feed to the gallery. A red light began to glow and spin. Someone had triggered the courtroom’s censorship system.

The system was believed to be under the control of the judge, Col. James Pohl. In this case, it wasn’t.

“The 40-second delay was initiated, not by me,” Pohl said. He was referring to the delayed audio feed, which normally broadcasts to the press and other observers seated in the gallery. The gallery is cut off from the courtroom by three layers of soundproof Plexiglas. “I’m curious as to why. … If some external body is turning the commission off under their own view of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation, then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off.”

Later, Pohl said the censorship was the work of an “OCA,” short for “Original Classification Authority.” In the future, he said, no external body would be permitted to unilaterally censor what was happening in his courtroom.

Many have speculated that Pohl’s “OCA” is in fact the CIA. That speculation is now confirmed with the release of three new documents by The Intercept. The documents show the evolution of secret rules governing what is and is not allowed to be discussed before the military court at Guantánamo.

All three of the declassified documents are marked “secret” and were distributed to defense attorneys and Pentagon-employed courtroom security officers. The documents clearly identify CIA as the OCA for torture-related information at the Guantánamo military commission proceedings.

Dean Boyd, who heads the CIA’s public affairs office, referred questions about the January 2013 censorship incident to the Pentagon. Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson, a Pentagon spokesperson, declined to comment. “I don’t have anything to offer you beyond what is written in [the court] transcript,” she said.

Another CIA spokesperson confirmed the dates of the guidance, which are not given in two of the three documents.

The first guidance document is from spring of 2008.

The second document is from late spring or early summer of 2009.

The third document is from September 2011.

The Intercept obtained the documents through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA and other federal agencies. Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic is providing legal representation for the request.

The term “OCA” is a placeholder that can refer to multiple agencies, but with respect to the rendition and torture program, Guantánamo observers have assumed for some time that it means the CIA. A defense lawyer asserted the connection in open court, and it has previously been hinted at in several other documents. At the end of January 2013, Judge Pohl issued a ruling declaring that there would be no more outside censorship of the tribunals. “It is the judge that controls the courtroom,” he said.

The courtroom’s internal censorship system, including the Plexiglas and audio delay, continues to this day. But assuming Judge Pohl’s order is enforced, the CIA no longer has the power to decide when to cut the courtroom audio, as it did in January 2013.

“The Department of the Defense runs the courtroom, but CIA owns a lot of the information,” said attorney James Connell III, who is representing Ammar al-Baluchi before the tribunal. Baluchi, whose torture at multiple overseas black sites was depicted in the film Zero Dark Thirty, is one of five men who stand accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks and now face the death penalty.

What appears to be a 2015 version of a similar CIA guidance document was released by OpenTheGovernment.org last year. Unlike the older guidance documents released by The Intercept today, the sections addressing the CIA’s black-site and rendition programs are completely redacted.

The CIA calls its classification rules “guidelines … to be applied throughout the legal process.” They are intended to provide the Pentagon-employed court security officers with “general direction about when national security information may be at issue, … triggering the need for protection.”

Much of what the CIA sought to keep out of open court effectively constrained the detainees’ ability to give an account of their own torture at the hands of the CIA and officials from other countries where they were held.

At first, these prohibitions were broad, but they grew narrower over time. The oldest guidance document, from 2008, prohibits talking about “conditions of confinement of detainees” and “treatment of detainees,” although “general allegations of torture are unclassified.” By this time, the CIA had released three of the names of detainees subjected to waterboarding. Though the CIA continues to insist those three were the only ones waterboarded, the claim is tenuous at best. According to the 2008 guidance, no other detainee could talk about waterboarding. Anyone who did, wrote the CIA, was lying, and even the existence of those lies was secret.

“Allegations of waterboarding by any detainees other than the three … are false allegations and are TS//SCI,” the guidance states.

In other words, even the alleged lies of other detainees who claimed to have been waterboarded were designated top secret and “sensitive compartmentalized information,” a higher-level classification than top secret alone. And yet many of these allegations, which the CIA’s guidance kept out of the tribunals for years, were later shown to have merit.

“In effect, the government was making the chilling and breathtaking assertion that it owned and controlled detainees’ memories of torture, whether true or false,” said Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the ACLU, who reviewed the newly released guidance documents.

“We stand by the document,” Dean Boyd, director of the CIA’s public affairs office, wrote in an email.

The 2008 guidance identifies CIA’s own “Original Classification Authority” as having the power to declassify statements by detainees. Other officials and agencies likely have some say as well. The 2011 and 2009 guidance say that the president and director of national intelligence can also declassify information related to the torture program; the 2008 guidance suggests that the power was delegated even further.

Seventy-six men are still held at Guantánamo. Sixteen are “forever prisoners,” who have not been charged by the court but are considered too dangerous to be candidates for release. President Obama’s self-imposed deadline to close the prison is more than six years past due.

Initially, the purpose of Guantánamo was to extract useful intelligence from high-level detainees to aid the war on terror. The orders to subject detainees to torture — or what the George W. Bush administration euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation” — came from the White House. It fell to the CIA to carry them out. The agency’s initial intelligence-driven mission got muddled up by other motives — revenge against al Qaeda, the avoidance of political fallout, control over the flow of information to Congress and the public, and later, by the problem of what to do with the detainees themselves.

Today’s legal environment is more open to detainees giving accounts of their own torture, according to Joseph Margulies, an attorney who represents Abu Zubaydah, one of the three men who the CIA admits having waterboarded.

“It is our position that the United States government has confirmed that Abu Zubaydah’s first-person account of his treatment is not classified,” Margulies said. “Therefore he ought to be allowed to disclose it.” As evidence of the shift, he pointed to the release of the Senate torture report summary, accounts of torture taken down by lawyers representing Majid Khan, and filings in Salim v. Mitchell, a lawsuit brought against two psychologists who designed the torture program as contractors for the CIA.

Connell, the attorney representing Ammar al-Baluchi, said that he welcomed the shift toward openness at Guantánamo but that the rules were still too restrictive. “The most important information for accountability is who did what and where they did it. Until that information is declassified, there will never be accountability for the CIA’s torture program.”

On July 12, 2016 the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled in favor of the Republic of the Philippines in its arbitration case against The Peoples Republic of China. The intervening weeks have seen a marked escalation in military deployments, activities and political rhetoric from China, the United States, Japan and quite interestingly, Vietnam. The Philippines has made efforts to deescalate the highly charged situation since its legal victory at the PCA.

China has instituted the practice of regular combat patrols over the disputed islands in the South China Sea, beginning with the first such patrol carried out on July 18th. In addition, China has dispatched numerous maritime surveillance vessels and civilian fishing fleets to the waters around Scarborough Shoal. These combat air patrols are to continue into the foreseeable future. China continues to develop its manmade islands’ military capabilities and continues to launch powerful naval vessels at breakneck speed.

The United States has heralded the PCA ruling as the definitive ruling on the dispute and has called on China to accept the the will of the international community and abide by international law. This, quite hypocritically, coming from one of a handful of nations that has refused to ratify the treaty. The U.S. has taken the unprecedented measure of stationing THAAD missile systems in South Korea, ostensibly aimed at defending this country from North Korean ballistic missiles. China has seen this move as one that changes the strategic situation in the region, and putting it at a distinct disadvantage. The U.S. announced the deployment of additional B-52 Stratofortress bombers to Guam on August 12th. More importantly, the additional deployment of B-1 and B-2 strategic bombers to the island was also announced. This marks the first time these nuclear-capable strategic assets have been deployed to Guam.

Vietnam quietly deployed defensive rocket artillery systems to a number of islands that it has occupied in the Spratly Archipelago. China almost immediately announced that Vietnam’s actions were a “terrible mistake”. It is hinted that the rocket artillery batteries will target the airfields built on Chinese occupied islands in the Spratlys.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration Ruling

The South China Sea Crisis took a decidedly ominous turn when the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in favor of the Philippines in the arbitration initiated by that nation on January 22, 2012. The Court ruled that it did have authority to rule on the arbitration, that China need not take part in the arbitration for it to be legitimate and binding, and that China’s “Nine Dash Line” was not valid as it did not comply with the UNCLOS (whose authority supersedes any historic rights), that China had taken actions to aggravate and not alleviate the dispute between it and the Philippines, and that no entitlements granted by islands within a nations EEZ or continental shelf can be obtained by artificial islands built on previously low-tide elevations. The PAC also ruled that Mischief Reef is within the EEZ of the Philippines.

China predictably refused to acknowledge the validity of the ruling or the authority of the PCA to preside over the arbitration in the first place. China officially went on record in 2006, a full six years before the arbitration was put forth by the Philippines, declaring under Article 298 of the UNCLOS that, “The Government of the People’s Republic of China does not accept any of the procedures provided for in Section 2 of Part XV of the Convention with respect to all the categories of disputes referred to in paragraph 1 (a) (b) and (c) of Article 298 of the Convention.”

The United States wasted little time in officially supporting the ruling and calling on China to abide by it. A State Department spokesman said that it “hopes and it expects” both parties to abide by the ruling. Chinese President Xi Jinping stated flatly that, “The islands in the South China Sea have been Chinese territories since ancient times. China opposes and will never accept any claim or action based on these awards.”

Many main stream media outlets have praised the PCA ruling and have concluded that it deals a heavy blow to the legitimacy of China’s actions in the South China Sea. Commentary from a cross section of the MSM seems to draw the conclusion that China must now abandon its “Nine Dash Line” claim, halt island reclamation efforts, and surrender the occupied Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal, or face mounting international diplomatic and legal pressure. They fail to either acknowledge or realize that the “Nine Dash Line” claim was never a serious territorial claim on the part of China, but a time-gaining policy of “strategic ambiguity” from the outset, that allowed China the time and diplomatic wiggle-room to establish a real and concrete military presence at key points in the region. Following age-old naval strategy, China has been busy occupying the “central position” in the region, fortifying this position to take advantage of internal lines of communication, movement and logistics, and establishing a viable and robust A2/AD umbrella over the entire South China Sea. To China, the “South China Sea Dispute” has been a wonderful cover that has provided an effective distraction from its very real, strategic build-up in the area. China is playing a very different game than the Philippines or the United States, and it has spent decades strengthening its strategic position in the South China Sea, a region rich in oil and natural gas, fish and other marine life, and that facilitates over $5 trillion USD in maritime trade traffic annually.

Chinese Escalations

Following the PCA ruling in the middle of July, China has taken a number of steps that would seem, on the surface, to be retaliatory in nature. Western media has largely portrayed these actions in just such a manner; however, many of these apparent escalations have been years in the making and do not directly coincide with the arbitration ruling.

Bomber and Fighter Combat Patrols

Beginning on July 18th, just days after the PCA ruling, China began combat air patrols over the disputed regions of the South China Sea. These air patrols consisted of both strategic bombers, aerial tankers and air superiority fighter aircraft. H-6K bombers (based on the Soviet Tu-16), which are capable of carrying nuclear armed bombs and cruise missiles, were dispatched along with Su-30 air superiority fighters and aerial re-fueling tankers (most likely HY-6 or even IL-78 aircraft). The H-6K has six under-wing hard points that can carry either DF-10 nuclear capable Land Attack Cruise Missiles (LACM) or YJ-12 Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCM).

Image: Chinese Air Force H-6K flies by Scarborough Shoal in mid-July.

Launching of New Navy and Coast Guard Vessels

Although the timing of the building schedules of additional Type 052D destroyers and a new China Coast Guard cutter based on the Type 054 frigate are merely coincidental with the PCA ruling, they do highlight the rapid speed at which China is acquiring new naval warfare platforms. Since March of this year, at least nine PLAN vessels of significant size and capabilities have been commissioned. The China Coast Guard also continues to grow.

On March 7th, three Type 072A Landing Ship Tank (LST) were commissioned in a single day. They have been assigned to the East China Sea Fleet, the area of operations of which cover the Senkaku Islands. The adding of this new amphibious landing capability sends a clear message to both Japan and Taiwan that China is modernizing and expanding its amphibious assault capabilities.

On May 30th, a Type 054A Class Frigate (FFG) was commissioned (# 536), with an additional Type 054A commissioned (#551) just one week later on June 8th. On the very same day, the Type 056A Corvette (#508) was also commissioned. That amounts to three modern surface combatants commissioned in one week. Also in June, the China Coast Guard took delivery of its own Type 054A frigate, in this case modified as a large Cutter with the 32 cell VLS removed.

Image: Newly commissioned Type 903A replenishment vessel. The PLAN continues to expand its complement of logistics support vessels.

On July 15th, the PLAN saw the commissioning of two new Type 903A replenishment vessels, #963 and #964. These vessels are crucial in providing logistics support to fleets dispatched for long periods of time, or during times of war when ammunition and fuel are consumed at higher rates. They will prove necessary for any future aircraft carrier strike group (CSG) deployments. Perhaps of greatest significance, the fourth Type 052D Destroyer (DDG), #175 Yinchuan, was commissioned on July 12th. This vessel will be followed soon by the # 117 Xiningwhich is currently undergoing sea trials. Six more Type 052D DDGs are currently built and being fitted out at the Dalian and Jiangnan shipyards. These vessels represent the most advanced and potent vessels in the PLAN’s inventory.

Increased Presence near the Senkaku Islands

Japan has issued a stern official protest to the Chinese government for the recent incursion of Chinese survey vessels, Coast Guard vessels and dozens of civilian fishing boats into the territorial waters of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands. Japan summoned the Chinese ambassador to voice their concern and submit a formal protest. The Chinese ambassador, Cheng Yonghua, stated in an interview with the press, “I told him that … it is natural that Chinese ships conduct activity in the waters in question. I also told him both countries need to work on dialogue through diplomatic channels so as not to make things more complicated and escalated.”

Image: A Japan Coast Guard Cutter confronting a China Marine Surveillance vessel within the territorial waters of the Senkaku Islands. Such incidents have increased in recent weeks.

The recent increase in Chinese pressure on Japan in the East China Sea follows closely on the heels of the PCA ruling, and after Japan’s official communication in support of the award in favor of the Philippines. Japan has gone on record supporting the Philippines in their position, even sending the JS Oyashio attack submarine and two guided missile destroyers, JS Ariake DDG 109 and JS Setogiri DDG 156 to Subic Bay in a show of support during the multi-national training exercise Balikitan 2016 in April.

Completion of Type 054 Frigate based Cutter for Coast Guard

Mentioned earlier in connection with Chinese vessel commissionings in recent months, the acquisition by the China Coast Guard (CCG) of a Type 054A Frigate is quite significant. Pictures appeared in the media of the vessel in June, bearing pennant # 46301. It appears that the vessel maintains the deck gun and close-in defense weapons of the frigate design, but dispenses with the 32 cell VLS. The additional space in the bow section will most likely be utilized to accommodate life-saving equipment or aids to navigation support, more in line with Coast Guard duties.

Image: The newest CCG Cutter based on the Type 054A FFG. The first of how many?

China already operates the largest Coast Guard in the region, having expanded the service to approximately 200 vessels of all sizes. The China Coast Guard already operates the two largest vessels of any Coast Guard in the region. The CCG #2901 and CCG #3901 displace between 12,000 and 15,000 tons, both larger than the Japanese Coast Guard Shikishima Class Cutters, at 6,500 tons. At around 4,000 tons displacement, the new vessel is smaller than these Cutters, but it represents a balance of endurance, range and speed that will greatly improve the capabilities of the CCG. At a cruising speed of 18 knots, the operational radius of the vessel is approximately 8,000 nautical miles without replenishment.

U.S. Escalation

The United States has taken an adversarial stance against China in its island building activities in the South China Sea from the start, and has lead a number of freedom of navigation cruises by US Navy warships and over-flights by both surveillance aircraft and even B-52 bombers, starting in December of last year. The United States has supported both the Philippines and Vietnam politically, and increasingly through military aid and arms sales. The United States officially ended its arms embargo of Vietnam on May 23rd of this year, dispatched two Carrier Strike Groups to the region to take part in military exercises in conjunction with the Philippines this summer, and has made numerous official statements that it expects China to abide by the ruling of the PCA. It is very interesting to note, and almost never reported in the main stream media, that the United States did not ratify the UNCLOS, siting threats to U.S. sovereignty rights as chief amongst its concerns. As much as it exclaims the preeminence of international law, it refuses to surrender itself to the restrictions and requirements of UNCLOS.

Deployment of THAAD to South Korea

On July 7th, the U.S. and S. Korea officially agreed to the deployment of Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems to South Korean territory. Although the reason given is to defend South Korea from an increasingly belligerent North Korea and its arsenal of nuclear capable ballistic missiles, China has accurately interpreted the move as a threat to its own security and the nuclear balance of power in the region. U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems forward deployed to the Korean peninsula are more of a threat to China, in their ability to shoot down long range ballistic missiles fired from China on their upward trajectory, than they can defend against short range missiles fired from North Korea at its estranged southern neighbor. Either China will respond in kind, perhaps beginning nuclear deterrent patrols with its new ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) fleet closer to U.S. territorial waters, or the deployment of THAAD will encourage China to act unilaterally or in concert with South Korea in reigning in North Korea’s military provocations.

Deployment of B-52, B-1 and B-2 Bombers

Just this week, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that for the first time ever, B-52, B-1 and B-2 strategic bombers will all be stationed at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam at the same time. B-52 Stratofortresses have been deployed to Guam on a rotational basis for many years; however, this will be the first deployment of both B-1 Lancer supersonic and B-2 Freedom stealth bombers to the island. The only way to interpret such a deployment, is that the U.S. is bringing to bear increasingly capable assets to the Pacific region. These B-1 and B-2 bombers were both designed to be able to penetrate advanced enemy air defenses to deliver both nuclear munitions and precision guided conventional weapons. The deployment of such assets greatly escalates an already volatile situation.

Image: B-52, B-1 and B-2 bombers all parked on the tarmac at Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam.

Japanese Escalation

For its part, the Japanese government has made a number of provocative announcements since the PCA ruling was made public on July 12th. Perhaps in response to Chinese actions in the East China Sea, or in conjunction with the United States in a larger defensive strategy, these announcements are sure to aggravate a Chinese government increasingly assailed by a concerted effort to contain and countermand it. It appears that Japan is increasing its cooperation with both the United States and the Philippines in its defense posture towards China.

Adoption of THAAD

It was announced on Japan’s national broadcaster NHK on the 9th of August, that the government is considering purchasing and deploying the U.S. THAAD system in an attempt to bolster its Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense. This announcement follows the North Korean launch of two No Dong intermediate range ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. One of the missiles reportedly splashed down within the 200 mile EEZ of Japan. Whether this announcement was aimed at North Korea or China (or most likely both) is not clear, as Japan also announced its intention to develop a short range, surface-to-surface anti-ship missile system intended to defend the Senkaku Islands from waterborne attack.

Anti-Ship Missiles for Deployment in the Senkaku Islands

The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on Sunday, August 14th, that an internal Ministry of Defense report calls for the development of a shore based anti-ship guided missile system to defend the Senkaku Islands from waterborne threats. The missiles will have a range of approximately 190 miles (300 km.) and should be ready for deployment by 2023. The Japanese Ministry of Defense has not made any comments supporting nor denying the newspaper’s claims. If true, the program acknowledges Japanese resolve not only to defend what it views as its sovereign territory, but also to base defensive missile systems on the islands themselves.

Although Japan has the capacity to defend the Senkaku Islands via warships and aircraft, the deployment of missile systems to the islands would confirm a plan to garrison troops there, something that has been resisted in the past. Perhaps elements of the Ground Defense Forces Western Army Infantry Regiment, trained in amphibious and air assault, will be based on the Senkaku Islands in the near future. Japan intends to build an amphibious brigade around the nucleus of the Western Army Infantry Regiment, complete with 52 AAVs and 17 V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

Image: Japanese troops from the Western Army Infantry Regiment train with U.S. Marines in Hawaii in conducting amphibious assault with AAV7s, August of 2014.

Vietnamese Escalations

For its part, the Vietnamese Armed Forces have remained relatively quiet in the face of current escalations in the South China Sea. It is important to recognize that Vietnam has fought at least two naval skirmishes with China, both in the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Following the Johnson South Reef Skirmish of 1988, Vietnam moved to fortify the islands that it occupies in the South China Sea. Vietnam maintains defensive garrisons on a number of islands, having engaged in limited land reclamation projects of its own. Immediately after the July 12thruling by the PCA, Vietnam took measures to further arm a number of these island bastions.

Deployment of Rocket Systems to the Spratly Islands

Although Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry vehemently denies the fact, a Reuters report published on the 11th of August, details the positioning of mobile rocket launchers on a number of Vietnamese occupied islands in the Spratly Island chain. Citing a number of “Western official sources”, these rocket launchers are aimed at neighboring Chinese defense installations, most notably airstrips and aircraft support installations. Chinese state-run media responded to the report in an article that alluded to the military clashes between the two nations over islands in the South China Sea in the past. An article run in the Global Times stated, in very direct terms that, ““If Vietnam’s latest deployment is targeting China, that would be a terrible mistake. We hope Vietnam will remember and draw some lessons from history.”

Conclusion

The weeks immediately following the PCA ruling at The Hague, regarding the arbitration brought forth by the Philippines against China, have been marked by an increasing escalation of both the South China Sea Crisis and the territorial dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea. The broader crisis has even effected the Koreas and Japan in terms of their greater strategic defense posture. It is interesting to note that all parties involved, with the exception of the Philippines, have taken steps to escalate the crisis and increase tensions in the region. The Republic of the Philippines, perhaps the least belligerent of all nations involved in territorial disputes in the South China Sea, has acted to deescalate the situation, even reaching out to Chinese officials to negotiate a bilateral agreement that would help resolve the issues involved. This is doubly surprising given the inflammatory reputation of the new President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.

Increasing escalation in the region will continue until the various parties to the multitude of disputes come to an honorable and equitable solution, or a number of lines are crossed. These ‘trip-wires” include: China beginning land reclamation  on Scarborough Shoal, China or Japan militarily occupying the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, or Vietnam threatening China’s major installations in the Spratly Islands with a build-up of weapons systems. Considering the current pace of escalation, the world has weeks or months to wait to see if any of the parties involved are willing to engage in open military confrontation to advance their claims and interests in this most heated global crisis.

Brian Kalman is a management professional in the marine transportation industry. He was an officer in the US Navy for eleven years. He currently resides and works in the Caribbean.

At the Black Summit “Hoodstock 2016”, last night, in Montreal, a sister stood up during one of the panel discussions to place due emphasis on the pioneering role played by African women in the U.S. in launching the most recent reaffirmation of African self-love, aka: The Black Lives Matter Movement.

During the bus ride back to Ottawa, I could not stop thinking about the importance of that timely intervention. Indeed, students of history must be ever mindful of the role patriarchy plays in mis-shaping our collective memory of historical facts and events. For those of us who are descendants of displaced Africans (survivors of the Maafa), it is even more vital to learn about, acknowledge, share and celebrate the heroic stands taken by our daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, throughout the ages.

Let us applaud the pioneering work of Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrice Cullors whose labor of love launched #BlackLivesMatter. The movement they launched in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) with the powerful social media hashtag to support mourners of 18-year old Mike Brown who was killed at the hands of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, has since mushroomed into a formidable global movement for justice.

As I mentioned during my speech at Hoodstock 2016, although the words we use to express it differ from country to country, from generation to generation, for a long while now, Africans all over the globe have been screaming to their tormentors ears: “I am an asset, not a threat!”. In the barrios of Rio de Janiero, in the mines of Sierra Leone, Congo and Azania as in New-York City (USA), Ottawa (Canada), Marseille (France) and Cite-Soleil (Haiti) black hands and voices have arisen again and again, to exclaim: “don’t shoot, don’t contaminate, don’t incarcerate – I am an asset, not a threat”.

Today, August 14, 2016, marks the 225th anniversary of Bwa Kay Iman, a momentous world event I consider to be among the many roots of Black Lives Matter. As dozens of African women and men gathered in the woods of Northern Haiti, the night of August 14-15, 1791, pledging their lives to the abolitionist revolution, they were affirming African self-love in a most dramatic and effective manner. For hundreds of years, kidnapped, displaced and tortured women, men and children had attempted to civilize their torturers, to educate them about the fact of their humanity, to reason with them, to escape from them. It was all to no avail. The visceral attachment European imperialists had with stolen wealth rendered them death, blind and stupid at once. So, the inevitable happened; 450,000 enslaved souls rose up on the Caribbean island and, over a bloody 12-year war, they chased out the Spanish, British and French murderers who had held them in bondage since 1499.

Asked about the Haitian revolution, few Africans living on or off the island who are familiar with the subject may name Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe, Boukman and Jean-Jacques Dessalines as leaders of the Revolution. Yet, throughout the uprising, African women and African men had always struggled side by side, in efficient complicity. Haiti’s great liberator and founder Jean-Jacques Dessalines, himself, was trained and educated in the arts of warfare by the valiant ABDARAYA TOYA, a fierce elder who led her own regiment of soldiers during the war of independence. “Grann Toya” is said to have been a close friend to Dessalines’ mother who passed away soon after his birth. Other key figures of the Haitian Revolution include the amazing Lieutenant Sanit Bélair, whose portrait now graces Haitian paper currency, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière and Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur, initiator of the January 1st Pumpkin Soup Revolutionary Communion.

In closing, I would like to dedicate this humble text to all the women and men, boys and girls whose names we are unable to retrace although we know they stood up on the shores of Africa to resist their kidnappers. To Aminata who might have tightly held unto her newborn as she jumped overboard “The Good Ship Jesus”, reaching the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with at least one of her Portuguese kidnappers whom she grabbed during her desperate leap, let us respond: “nou renmen ou grangrann: Indeed, Mama Aminata, our black lives matter”.

To Simba, to Araya who never survived long enough to transmit family names to our present generation of Africans in Rio, in Ottawa, in Acra, in Washington, we say: “yes, we value our black lives in which we pledge to invest love everlasting”.

To the inheritors of the loot collected by Napoleon Bonaparte, Leopold, Elizabeth I and John Hawkins, we say:

“Brother, sister, we are not a threat!”.

Listen up, wise up! Forget about the wall you plan to erect to prevent the Mexicans from returning to their ancestral lands. Listen up, wise up! Your coast guards are not numerous enough to stop the rightful owners of Congo’s gold and coltran from finding the whereabouts of the riches you’ve stolen from their land.

Listen up, wise up! 1 million Haitians you’ve contaminated with cholera, after having killed over 10,000 black lives on the island since 2004, will not let you sleep in peace at night. Listen up, wise up! white privilege is the real threat to all of our lives. Give it up and let us move forward, together, investing in all our assets.

Technology developed to jam cellphones during the Iraq War may be getting deployed against journalists reporting on protests against the political establishment in the United States.

While police and government surveillance of protests, including monitoring of cellphone use, is well-documented, efforts to block signals at protests remains an oft-repeated, but never proven, rumor.

It may be impossible to definitively prove that authorities are using cellphone “jamming” technology, but journalists working with both mainstream and independent media reported unusual difficulties accessing the internet during recent protests at the gates of the Democratic National Convention, consistent with the effects this very real technology could have.

During the protests outside the DNC, which I covered for MintPress News, I experienced this personally, with my internet connection behaving suspiciously near the convention’s security fences and entrance gates, often abruptly blocking my tweets and other communication. The same was true for every other journalist I spoke with who covered the protests.

“It’s scary for me as a journalist because that’s how state suppression of events occurs,” said Desiree Kane, a freelance journalist and direct action organizer who covered the Republican National Convention for MintPress and also took part in protests in Philadelphia.

“That’s exactly how it happens is you block communications of what might be going down,” she added.

‘By Tuesday night, everybody noticed’

Jon Ziegler, an experienced citizen journalist, spoke with me on July 28, the final day of the DNC. He recalled his shock at the obvious disruption to his service during the previous days’ events.

Ziegler, who livestreams on several social networks under the name @Rebelutionary_Z and supports his work through crowdfunding, has been covering protests and activism like that which occurred in Philadelphia since the early days of the national Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.

“I’ve streamed all over the country. I’ve streamed in big cities and small towns, large crowds, any type of situation you can imagine,” he said.

He said it’s important to distinguish between normal, everyday disruptions — for example, a temporary loss of signal caused by tall buildings during protests in downtown Philadelphia — and the seemingly deliberate interruptions journalists experienced near the Wells Fargo Center, the site of the DNC in South Philadelphia.

“You have some data reception issues for here and there, but they always will correct themselves, and I can usually do some measures to get back up live very quickly.”

Just before traveling to the convention, Ziegler upgraded his livestreaming equipment so that he could access a portable WiFi hotspot through Verizon and another phone using AT&T. This would allow him to alternate between the two networks at a moment’s notice. In addition, he uses multiple livestreaming apps connected to his Twitter account, allowing him to switch apps during interruptions.

“Here in Philadelphia, I’ve actually had the most options for connecting to the internet and streaming services that I’ve ever had in the four years that I’ve been doing this, and yet I’ve encountered the most problems, especially down by the gate of the DNC, than ever before.”

Connection problems occurred with varying degrees of severity throughout the week of the DNC, and it was a frequent topic of conversation among journalists. “Monday night we we were talking about how it was strange, but by Tuesday night, everybody kind of noticed, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t right,’” Ziegler said.

“At some points, even just trying to send tweets out was impossible,” he continued. “Heaven forbid you try to upload a video or photo, but sometimes even text tweets are impossible to get out.”

Regardless of the network carrier and the livestreaming app he used, Ziegler was often stymied.

“Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the second we even get close to those gates my livestream gets glitchy, or drops out completely, or you just can’t connect to the internet at all.”

Even mainstream media journalists experienced jamming at DNC

My experiences matched Ziegler’s. For the first time in years, I sometimes had to rely on Twitter’s antiquated text message gateway to send out the simplest of tweets using SMS messages. Using the Twitter app, even non-multimedia tweets sometimes took over an hour to publish.

Some of the worst interruptions came on the night of Wednesday July 27. Because it was the night President Barack Obama spoke to the convention, the fence was guarded by the Secret Service as well as local, state and federal police.

The already troubling bandwidth problems peaked during some of the week’s most intense protesting, just as activists briefly broke through the security fence, and social networks and livestreaming services remained largely inaccessible for the rest of the night.

Kane found that her cellphone service disappeared just as she filmed a group of armored riot police briefly deployed to the disruption outside of the DNC.

Spooked by the service interruption and the sudden increase in tensions between protesters and police, she said, “I walked away maybe five blocks back to my car,” where she found her service returned, allowing her to upload her video.

“Even mainstream journalists were starting to question whether we had some kind of jamming,” Ziegler told me.

I spoke briefly with Myles Miller, a reporter for New York’s PIX11 News, who expressed frustration at his inability to share video of events as they unfolded, or even immediately after.

.@PIX11News‘ cameras were rolling as protestors clashed with police outside the @DemConvention pic.twitter.com/IbluFI9wAE

— Myles Miller (@MylesMill) July 28, 2016

Unicorn Riot, another crowdfunded team of journalists, described similar bandwidth issues. And a staff member from Fusion, part of a group of representatives of the online news site at the protests, told me that although they were equipped with specialized livestreaming equipment which linked five SIM cards — the equivalent of having five mobile phones working together, across multiple cellular networks — the team was still unable to get a signal on Wednesday night after the fence was breached.

On July 28, the convention’s final night, I found the ability to share photos and videos was slightly improved — tweets uploaded slowly rather than not at all. But when protesters again gathered near the fence, both Ziegler and I noticed that our signals cut out entirely, exactly when police moved to push the protest away with their bicycles.

And, later that night, Joanne Leon, a citizen journalist, reported to me via Twitter that she’d watched every user in the area on Periscope, a popular livestreaming app, simultaneously “disappear” from the internet.

Periscope streams on perimeter of DNC conv all stopped at once.#DemsInPhilly pic.twitter.com/oCfa3xxHbD

— Joanne Leon (@joanneleon) July 29, 2016

  Developed in Iraq, deployed in Philadelphia?

The use of cellphone jamming technology to protect the president, as may have occurred on July 27 during the convention, is an open secret: occasionally reported on, but rarely discussed. The Washington Post reported in 2009:

“As President Obama’s motorcade rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, federal authorities deployed a closely held law enforcement tool: equipment that can jam cellphones and other wireless devices to foil remote-controlled bombs, sources said. It is an increasingly common technology, with federal agencies expanding its use as state and local agencies are pushing for permission to do the same. … But jamming remains strictly illegal for state and local agencies. Federal officials barely acknowledge that they use it inside the United States, and the few federal agencies that can jam signals usually must seek a legal waiver first.”

But while illegal for them to use in most cases in this manner, police do have access to technology that can interfere with cell signals, deliberately or otherwise. “Stingrays,” the controversial devices which let police monitor cellphone signals by masquerading as a cell tower, are routinely used to maintain lists of activists who attend protests. But they can interfere with signals, too.

Last year, the ACLU forced the federal government to admit to the Stingray’s capability to block signals as well as monitor them, sometimes even interfering with innocent bystanders uninvolved with protests or other events that involve police.

“We think the fact that stingrays block or drop calls of cell phone users in the vicinity should be of concern to cell service providers, the FCC, and ordinary people,” Nate Wessler, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a March 2015 interview with WIRED magazine. “If an emergency or important/urgent call (to a doctor, a loved one, etc.) is blocked or dropped by this technology, that’s a serious problem.”

#FBISkySpies, DHS, USAF, Pennsylvania State Police conducting aerial surveillance simultaneously over #DNCinPHL. pic.twitter.com/rHPBZG5SZl

— North Star Post (@NStarPost) July 25, 2016

  Police and the U.S. government are famously reticent to admit to their use of this technology or its capabilities, even once, in 2014, going so far as to seize court records to keep them out of the hands of the ACLU. Harris Corporation, the manufacturer of the Stingray, is even known to have police and other law enforcement agencies sign nondisclosure agreements, legally binding them from revealing details of the technology and its usage.

And with multiple law enforcement agencies known to be engaging in surveillance activities in Philadelphia during the convention, it may be impossible to determine who was responsible. Derrick Broze, writing in an April 2015 MintPress investigation, suggested:

“The federal government, local police departments and the Harris Corporation are participating in a coordinated effort to keep the public in the dark about the full capabilities of cell site simulator surveillance devices, also known as Stingrays.”

It is worth noting that while greater attention has been paid to law enforcement’s use of large-scale military equipment like armored vehicles, cellphone jamming is another example of wartime technology brought home for domestic use. During the Iraq War, cellphone jammers known as Warlocks, were a highly secretive device designed to block the detonation of remote-control bombs.

‘It doesn’t help me feel safe’

While journalists may be the most outspoken targets of cellphone jamming, protesters facing arrest or police brutality are at higher risk.

Desiree Kane, the freelance journalist who attended both the RNC and DNC, is also an experienced protest organizer. She agreed that jamming technology endangers activists, in addition to threatening their First Amendment rights.

“Medics might be watching Twitter to see if they need to deploy other people,” she said. “There’s a lot that depends on our communications.”

But she also emphasized the importance of smartphones and social media to press freedom. “Twitter for journalists is critical,” she noted, highlighting the social media platform’s importance for reporting breaking news.

It’s hard not to be concerned at the expanding use of this technology, especially as the government pushes for access to an “internet kill switch” and corporate players like Apple develop blocks of their own. The potential uses for the technology during future unrest or mass protests are troubling.

“When you take away that kind of tool when things are going down, it doesn’t help me feel safe,” Kane concluded.

Is it possible that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will self-destruct well before the election?  It certainly looked that way, given one major blunder after another in the days after his nomination at the July 18–21 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Here’s another question: Or is it possible he can win? Both options are still on the table because despite voting polls both candidates continue to remain unpopular with the majority of Americans.

Meanwhile, in a mass fundraising letter to her supporters this week, Hillary Clinton declared:

“I know what we are capable of doing together. Together we can break down every barrier holding Americans back, and build ladders of opportunity for everyone. America was built by people who had each other’s backs, who understood we all have to do our part and that at our best we all rise together. That’s the Democratic vision I’ve worked toward my whole life.”

Who knew this woman, who seemed fairly conservative all her political life, was a secret socialist? As such, however, she should have mentioned slavery, the destruction of Native American society and the gross exploitation of the working class throughout those years of her quaint “all rise together” version of American history.

In recent weeks the billionaire businessman has generated extreme turmoil within his own party by mocking the Muslim parents of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq, refusing to support the re-election of key Republicans (such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan), questioning why he shouldn’t use nuclear weapons, and  — to top it off — seeming to call for gun owners to protect the 2nd Amendment by, well, shooting Clinton. There’s no telling what absurdity he will utter next.

But — don’t bet on Hillary Clinton yet to win in November, even though she was ahead in polls in the days after her nomination at the July 25-28 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Real Clear Politics combined different six big time national polls in August up to the 12th. The result: Hillary leads by 6.8% — 47.8 to Trumps 41.0. The Aug. 2 CNN tally, not in the combined list, was Clinton, 45%, Trump 37%, Donald Johnson (Libertarian) 10 and the Green party’s Jill Stein, 5%. Gallop Aug. 3 reported the most recent poll of Americans about their views of the candidates, not how they would vote:  62% viewed Trump unfavorably and 52% thought so of Clinton.

Given the unpopularity issue, plus the contradictions in each party between the ruling establishments and rank-and-file and the possibility of staggering surprises or revelations to come in the nearly three months before the election (including the danger of a terrorist attack, and the probability of more computer hacking), nothing is certain at this stage.

Trump reversed himself Aug. 5 and finally endorsed the re-elections of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senators John McCain (Arizona) and Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire). In return, what used to be the GOP establishment is trying to accommodate to the most bizarre of presidential candidates and to what Stephanie Coontz describes as “the crudest alliance of racists, nativists, misogynists, and ‘know-nothings’ that America has seen in any national election since before World War II.” Rumors never cease that Republican leaders may find a way to kick him off the ticket before election day. At the same time there is great fear about retaliation from his supporters.

Trump’s hard-core right wing constituency remains enthusiastic about their bombastic candidate, despite — or rather because of — his right wing nationalism, racism, anti-Muslim and anti-Latino prejudices, as well as his extraordinary egotism, dishonesty and blatant ignorance. Whether Trump wins or loses, he has galvanized and given strength and direction to millions of Americans who previously kept their bigoted views within the family or expressed them only to fellow haters. Now it’s all out there since Trump entered the Republican primaries and may become more intense.

Despite some conservative billionaires and multimillionaires holding back their usual large donations to the Republican presidential race because of Trump’s antics and disregard for certain traditional rightist issues, the New York Times reported Aug 4: “Trump all but erased his enormous fund-raising disadvantage against Hillary Clinton in the span of just two months, according to figures released by his campaign Aug. 3, converting the passion of his core followers into a flood of small donations on a scale rarely seen in national politics.

Vermont Sen. Bernard (Bernie) Sanders financed his entire $200 million campaign on small donations and nearly gained the nomination. He showed for the first time in the modern era that a candidate for high office need not sell out to the plutocracy to obtain electoral power.

Sen. Sanders, who gathered 13,168, 222 primary votes to Clinton’s 16,847,084, may have lost the nomination but he succeed in politicizing multimillions of Americans toward progressivism and the left.  He has created a mass constituency for social change. Hopefully this force will be organized for action within the next year. Sanders further acquired more power within the Democratic party because of his huge following. It is assumed he will use that influence to promote support for his progressive legislative proposals.

What’s Next?

After a year of sharp infighting within America’s two ruling parties it is now clear that the traditional Republican establishment has lost its internal struggle for control, and the Democratic establishment won its fight against the liberal left upserge.  But this could all change.

If Trump loses in November, the former GOP leadership will quickly return to power, making sure to embrace some of the programs of the fallen candidate in order to retain most of his voters.  If he wins, the traditional GOP leadership will seek to exert dominant influence over a president who has no idea how to govern or what to do in office. Republican ultra-conservative Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence and far right Speaker Ryan among others will see to that. Meanwhile, conservative Old Boys will be plotting to take over after Trump’s term ends.

If Clinton loses it seems likely the Democrats will have to reorganize the party and it would be logical for the liberal/left to exert more leadership after years of being silenced during the center right Obama and Clinton eras. If Hillary wins, not much will change. However, a lot depends the pro-Bernie forces. It is not clear whether they will become an independent organization, the left liberal sector of the party or other configurations.

The problems afflicting the working class are finally being talked about in the U.S. today because they are among the reasons why both official parties are experiencing serious uprisings from their generally pliant rank and file voters. The fact is both parties were long aware that the working class and sectors of the middle class have been experiencing mounting hard times over recent decades— and they did nothing to alleviate this situation.  Guess who made the following statement and when it was made:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

These prescient words were uttered at a California campaign fundraiser in 2008 by Sen. Barack Obama who, since then, has taken no significant action to mitigate this crisis. Indeed, it only seems to have convinced him to fight harder for passage of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which will eliminate more jobs.

Clinton supported the TPP for years until it became evident last year that Bernie’s opposition to the pact was popular with many voters, and she turned against it.  It is notable, however, that when the Sanders contingent sought to insert opposition to the TPP into the party platform, Clinton delegates defeated the measure. News reports indicate Obama will launch a major effort to pass the trade pact before he leaves office in January. He has two reasons for pushing further. The TPP will highly benefit U.S. and international corporations and, though rarely mentioned, it is a key part of the administration’s efforts to reduce China’s influence in East and South Asia. China has not been invited to join, of course,

 The Economic System

Trump revealed his economic program Aug. 8. Although he tried to make it appear his plan benefitted all the American people, including the working class, it turned out to be a typical right wing neoliberal program vastly benefitting the ruling class.  The New York Times commented editorially Aug. 9:

“Trump said that he wanted to usher in ‘economic renewal,’ but most of his proposals would hurt the economy, rack up huge deficits, accelerate climate change and leave the country isolated from the world. In a speech billed as a blueprint for stimulating growth and creating jobs, Mr. Trump offered a grab bag of ideas that borrow from discredited supply-side economics, the fossil fuel industry’s wish list and ‘America First’ isolationism….

“Mr. Trump told the Detroit Economic Club that he would cut taxes to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. He said he would slash the corporate tax rate to 15%, arguing that the current statutory 35% is one of the highest among developed countries. He did not mention that the average effective corporate tax rate was 18.1% in 2015, including state and local taxes….”

In trying to understand why both official political parties put the needs of the 1% to10% of the people first and those of the rest of the population second, keep in mind: Despite their differences, both parties adhere to neoliberal capitalism — the contemporary resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. The Republicans are stauncher advocates, of course. Such a system usually transfers control of economic matters to the private sector. It insists that governments must limit subsidies, minimize social spending for the people, reduce deficit spending, limit protectionism, back deregulation of private enterprise and privatize businesses run by the state. Its goal is to “free” the economy by eliminating state-imposed regulations and barriers. It’s that system that is the problem.

Within this neoliberal context the plutocracy prefers that the U.S. remains a two-party electoral system — one party far right, the other center right, functioning as the “lesser evil,” which, in this case, Hillary is to the Donald. This insures there will be continual “democratic” struggle between two parties, but all well within the assigned economic system. (There are those, such as economist Paul Krugman, who view the Democratic Party as center left. The last time the party was center left was in the 1960s when it was responsible for some amazing reforms and social programs. Today’s party is much closer to the now obsolete Moderate Republicans, hence center right. For example, Obama’s only significant, though flawed, social program, the Affordable Care Act, was a copy of the then Moderate Republican Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2006 health plan for Massachusetts.)

The two-party proviso is why it is so difficult to construct a viable national left third party in America. The last serious national effort to do so was the left wing Progressive party in 1948 when Roosevelt’s former Vice President Henry A. Wallace ran against Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey. The Progressives opposed Truman’s beginning stages of the Cold War against the USSR and demanded the end of nuclear weapons. They blasted Jim Crow racism supported by the Democratic southern Congressional delegation, and backed women’s rights, worker rights and civil rights. The new party was supported by communists, socialists and the left. It was redbaited viciously through the campaign, but it managed to obtain 2.4% of the popular vote. The subsequent crackdown on the political left lasted for decades.

There are a number of left political third parties in America, nearly all of them quite small and ignored by the media. Of these, several represent various socialist tendencies and several others operate within a capitalist perspective.

As a result of the Bernie Sanders campaign and his popularization of democratic socialism, the Green Party — which in the 2012 election championed “responsible stakeholder capitalism” — this year decided it sought a decentralized “alternative economic system” to capitalism. The nature of that system wasn’t thoroughly defined but it was based on “workplace and community democracy.” The Greens declared:

“We believe the old models of capitalism (private ownership of production) and state socialism (state ownership of production) are not ecologically sound, socially just, or democratic and that both contain built-in structures that advance injustices. Instead we will build an economy based on large-scale green public works, municipalization, and workplace and community democracy. Some call this decentralized system ecological socialism, communalism, or the cooperative commonwealth but whatever the terminology, we believe it will help end labor exploitation, environmental exploitation, and racial, gender, and wealth inequality and bring about economic and social justice due to the positive effects of democratic decision making.”

This sounds as though it was quickly put together with a lot of loose ends.

The Green party is expected to benefit considerably in November because an undetermined number of Bernie’s supporters will not vote for Clinton, and the Green party views itself as the alternative. Green presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein, who obtained less than 1% in the 2012 election, may get 5% this year because she has been heavily courting Bernie fans since he backed Clinton after leading the fight against her.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is also fielding a woman candidate for president in a number of states. She is revolutionary socialist activist and union leader Gloria LaRiva, who won the important nomination of California’s large Peace and Freedom party Aug. 13. Her running mate in this state is Dennis Banks, a lifelong activist for social justice and co-founder of the American Indian Movement. They call for socialist reforms in the state.

A Woman Candidate

It is long past time for a woman to be elected to the White House. This is a major matter of gender equity that must be addressed and supported. It cannot, of course, be addressed adequately unless the politics of the candidate selected for this historic role actually will fight to fulfill the social, economic and political needs and demands of the majority American working families who have been neglected for decades by both parties.

One stunning example of such neglect was casually articulated to a reporter for Democracy Now who was randomly asking questions of Bernie supporters picketing outside the convention. “My name is Jacinta Mack. I’m 35 years old. I’m from Queens, New York. And I’ve been in Philadelphia since Sunday. I’m here as a Bernie supporter and protesting.” Asked “can you describe this sign that you’re carrying?” She replied:

“It is a big poster board that is carved out with Bernie’s name on one side and ‘Never Hillary’ on the other side. When I was younger, my family was on welfare, and Bill Clinton was in office. And they passed welfare reform. We weren’t qualified for food stamps any longer. The monthly money that we got was cut. And then the subsidized housing was also cut. And my mother was required to go out and apply for a certain number of jobs, but she was a single mother of six children and wasn’t able to meet their requirements. We struggled tremendously. And my mother actually became a sex worker.”

Hillary Clinton strongly supported President Bill Clinton’s “ending welfare as we know it.” The legislation was backed by nearly all Republican politicians. Hillary continued to defend the measure until recently when Sanders sharply criticized this conservative maneuver.

Aside from the grudging acceptance of several progressive platform proposals from Sanders as payback for his endorsement, all indications are that a Clinton presidency will fail to satisfy the legitimate demands of masses of working class, middle class and poor women and men— particularly now when such unmet needs have accumulated for decades. A certain criticism of Wall St. has also entered the Democratic candidate’s vocabulary, but it is largely just rhetoric.

In recent decades, progressive election campaign promises are usually the first to be abandoned by the Democrats when its candidate enters the Oval office. Clinton has been and remains a servant of Wall Street, the big banks, the principal corporations and the richest 1% of the population who function as a plutocracy without the corporate mass media ever uttering the name.

In an Aug. 4 column in TomDispatch.com, titled The Decay of American Politics,
 Andrew J. Bacevich wrote of Clinton:

“Even by Washington standards, Secretary Clinton exudes a striking sense of entitlement combined with a nearly complete absence of accountability.  She shrugs off her misguided vote in support of invading Iraq back in 2003, while serving as senator from New York.  She neither explains nor apologizes for pressing to depose Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, her most notable ‘accomplishment’ as secretary of state. ‘We came, we saw, he died,’ she bragged back then, somewhat prematurely given that Libya has since fallen into anarchy and become a haven for ISIS. [Last week President Obama resumed bombing Libya to dislodge the Islamic State, which occupied the coastal city of Sirte as a consequence of Clinton’s enthusiasm for regime change in Libya. U.S. Special Forces contingents are also fighting in Libya. The main fighting to liberate Sirte is by troops of one of the three factions claiming to rule the country. And it appears they may succeed in driving IS out of this coastal city.]

“The essential point here is that, in the realm of national security, Hillary Clinton is utterly conventional. She subscribes to a worldview (and view of America’s role in the world) that originated during the Cold War, reached its zenith in the 1990s when the United States proclaimed itself the planet’s ‘sole superpower,’ and persists today remarkably unaffected by actual events. On the campaign trail, Clinton attests to her bona fides by routinely reaffirming her belief in American exceptionalism, paying fervent tribute to the world’s ‘greatest military,’ swearing that she’ll be ‘listening to our generals and admirals,’ and vowing to get tough on America’s adversaries. These are, of course, the mandatory rituals of the contemporary Washington stump speech, amplified if anything by the perceived need for the first female candidate for president to emphasize her pugnacity.”

Foreign Policy

Nearly 15 years of the Bush-Obama wars have caused death and destruction throughout the Middle East, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan, then the illegal war of choice against Iraq, spreading further over the years. After this election a third presidential
 name will be added to the list. The wars are hardly mentioned much less debated by the candidates. Nothing will change after the election, given the caliber of the two candidates and the historic nature of the two war parties.

Clinton and the Democratic establishment have seen to it that there will be no substantive changes in Washington’s current foreign/military affairs, which are based on the policy adopted after the implosion of the Soviet Union over a quarter century ago. In essence: Enforce unilateral U.S. global hegemony.

The 2016 platform says succinctly:

“American leadership is essential to keeping us safe and our economy growing in the years ahead. It would be a dangerous mistake for America to abandon our responsibilities. We cannot, as Donald Trump suggests, cede the mantle of leadership for global peace and security to others who will not have our best interests in mind.”

Trump’s remarks have been distorted, of course, as they are elsewhere in the platform.

Clinton and the Democratic establishment have seen to it that there will be no substantive changes in Washington’s current foreign/military affairs, which are based on the policy adopted after the implosion of the Soviet Union over a quarter century ago. In essence: Enforce unilateral U.S. global hegemony.

The 2016 platform says succinctly: “American leadership is essential to keeping us safe and our economy growing in the years ahead. It would be a dangerous mistake for America to abandon our responsibilities. We cannot, as Donald Trump suggests, cede the mantle of leadership for global peace and security to others who will not have our best interests in mind.” Trump’s remarks have been distorted, of course, as they are elsewhere in the platform.

The Middle East situation won’t change. Bush-Obama wars will continue and probably get bigger under a Clinton administration, certainly increasing action to oust the Assad government in Damascus. David Cole captured the flavor Of Obama’s militarism in the Aug. 18 N.Y. Review of Books:

“The news that the United States had killed 150 unnamed individuals in a country halfway around the world with which it is not at war [Somalia, last March] generated barely a ripple of attention, much less any protest, here at home. Remote killing outside of war zones, it seems, has become business as usual.

This is a remarkable development, all the more noteworthy in that it has emerged under Barack Obama, who came to office as an antiwar president, so much so that he may be the only person to win the Nobel Peace Prize based on wishful thinking. Our Peace Prize president has now been at war longer than any other American president, and has overseen the use of military force in seven countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. In the latter four countries, virtually all the force has come in the form of unmanned drones executing suspected terrorists said to be linked to al-Qaeda or its “associated forces.”

The Democratic platform also notes: “A strong and secure Israel is vital to the United States because we share overarching strategic interests and the common values of democracy, equality, tolerance, and pluralism. That is why we will always support Israel’s right to defend itself, including by retaining its qualitative military edge, and oppose any effort to delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.” As though the issue were Israel’s right to defend itself and not the imprisonment and bombings of Gaza, the continual Israeli land-grab in West Bank and the rights of Palestinians in general.

The Russians Are Coming

The Democratic campaign platform on NATO is dishonest when it argues:

“We reject Donald Trump’s threats to abandon our European and NATO allies, all while he praises Putin.”  Trump — ever the money-minded businessman — suggested that he might not come to the aid of a NATO country that had not paid its dues. This was an outlandish statement, but hardly abandoning Europe. And he seemed to be facetious when he said that Russian intelligence should try to hack Clinton’s “missing emails.”

Trump also said he wanted to talk to the Russians in hopes of developing a less fraught relationship. This is a good idea that the Democratic candidate implies is treason. Would that she’d try it if she enters the White House, but Clinton views Russia and China as enemies with which the U.S. eventually may go to war — and that’s that.

It is interesting that Great Britain, America’s closest ally, has evidently decided to depart from the U.S. concerning Russia. Boris Johnson, the UK’s new foreign secretary, said Aug. 11 that Britain must “normalize” its relationship with Russia after years of hostility. He spoke on the phone with the Russian foreign minister, Serge Lavrov, and reportedly “discussed a possible normalization of bilateral ties.” The Telegraph (UK) also reported that Prime Minister Theresa May spoke earlier by telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin and “questioned the current state of Russian-British relations.” The pair will meet at the G20 summit of world leaders in China next month.

Candidate Clinton and her clique virtually made Trump into a Russian spy reporting regularly to President Putin, the most recent of many world leaders Washington has unjustly demonized since the end of World War II. It has not been proven that Putin or Russia, for that matter, hacked the thousands of E-mails from the Democratic Party computers that were publicized by WikiLeaks.

So far some news outlets including the New York Times are reporting the incident was a “Russian cyberattack,” carried out by two Russian intelligence groups, but U.S. government officials are only quoted as having  “high confidence” that the Russians were involved. “High confidence” means no proof.

The United States never stopped interfering and spying on Russia following the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Dec. 26, 1991 and the immediate transition to capitalism under the government of hard drinking President Boris Yeltsin, who ruled with considerable American support and guidance to the end of 1999. The U.S. knew virtually everything going on in the Russian Federation during that period — from spy satellites to commuter transmissions, telephone conversations, agents on the ground, paid informants within the government and Americans connected to the White House who actually worked with Yeltsin and his regime in developing state policy. The U.S. intention was to swiftly transform Russia into a capitalist country dependent upon and serving the interests of U.S imperialism.

American plans began to crumble when Vladimir Putin was elected president in 2000 (he was acting president from 1999-2000). He won a second term in 2004, became prime minister in 2008 and was reelected president in 2012 to the present.  Even his enemies acknowledge Putin’s popularity rating is about 80%. Putin continued the transition to capitalism, and ultimately became an open critic of the communist era, but absolutely denied the U.S. the ability to establish hegemony over the federation. The demonization began soon after it was clear he would not only keep Russia independent but began to criticize aspects of America’s aggressive foreign policy. In recent years U.S. government officials began referring to him as a “thug,” among other accusations. Speaking at the Democratic Convention July 24,Vice President Joe Biden actually referred to the popular Russian leader as a “dictator” despite his overwhelming victory in the 2012 election. The next day a spokesperson for Obama refused to dispute Biden’s remark.

As far as the spying allegation is concerned, suffice to say both sides do it. Regarding Putin and Trump it is wise to remember Putin is extremely intelligent and experienced and Trump is not. Why wouldn’t the Russian leader be interested in a presidential candidate who didn’t hold an angry grudge against him and his country and  seems to abjure the possibility of a war? We all know that both Obama and Clinton are enmeshed in the old Cold War. Clinton may be considered the lesser evil but in this case she’s more dangerous.

Criticism of Bernie

Sanders has received criticism from a vocal sector of his constituency and some left elements for supporting Hillary Clinton after his primary defeat instead of immediately forming a third party or accepting an invitation to become the candidate of the Green Party. Various post-convention opinion polls show between 70% and 90% of Bernie’s supporters intend to vote for Clinton.

Although we have long supported the construction of a viable national left third party and have only backed socialist or left third-party presidential candidates over the years, we disagree with a few of the extreme criticisms aimed at Sanders, particularly that of journalist Chris Hedges, who backs the Green Party candidate, and in a speech outside the convention after hundreds of Sanders’ delegates walked out. It was reprinted on the Internet. We think his unfortunate rant speaks far more about the critic than the subject. Below is a short quote from this speech:

“The parade of useful idiots, the bankrupt liberal class that long ago sold its soul to corporate power, is now led by Sen. Bernie Sanders…. He [Bernie] took his 30 pieces of silver and joined with a bankrupt liberal establishment on behalf of a candidate who is a tool of Wall Street, a proponent of endless war and an enemy of the working class. Sanders, like all of the self-identified liberals who are whoring themselves out for the Democrats, will use fear as the primary reason to remain enslaved by the neoliberal assault. And, in return, the corporate state will allow him and the other useful idiots among the 1% to have their careers and construct pathetic monuments to themselves.”

Bernie did a successful job within the limits of his mandate. However he could have handled the end game better after Clinton won the primary. He was pledged to support the winner but appeared overenthusiastic in his backing and praise for Hillary — whom he had been excoriating, correctly, for many months. At the convention, in his speech and when he called for the vote to be unanimous in Hillary’s favor, he went over the top, much to the chagrin of a number of his 1,900 delegates. Also he should have been in much closer touch with his nationwide followers in the disappointing final few weeks, urging them to look ahead by putting forward a number of concrete proposals. Some delegates at the convention complained that they received little guidance. The July 30 edition of The Economist noted:

“In the end Bernie Sanders came through. The Senator from Vermont had threatened to take his fight for a “political revolution” to the floor of the Democratic National Convention…. But when his aggrieved supporters had the temerity to take that threat seriously by booing the convention’s early stages, Mr. Sanders tried to calm them and just about succeeded.”

The Washington Post reported:

“Bernie Sanders closed out the first day of the Democratic party’s convention with a forceful plea for his supporters to get behind the party’s nominee Hillary Clinton. The Vermont senator spoke to a packed arena that had for hours swung wildly from unified highs to divided lows….’ Based on her ideas and her leadership, Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States.’ Sanders said. ‘The choice is not even close.’ Even as he spoke, the reaction was mixed and emotions ran high. His most ardent supporters called out “We want Bernie!” Others stood silently, tears streaming down their faces. Meanwhile, Clinton’s supporters rose to their feet, chanting “Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!”

Why Did Bernie Run For The Nomination

Sen. Sanders was 74 near the end of long career and he wanted to finally get his progressive message out to the masses of people when he decided last year to become a Democrat and run for the presidential nomination. He knew the times and attitudes were changing after decades of stagnant wages, lower benefits, lousy jobs for the working class, huge student debts, and grave economic inequality — all of which were exacerbated by the 2008 Great Recession and sluggish recovery.

He thought the only way his leftist program and critique would get any significant press and TV coverage from the corporate mass media was if he entered the Democratic primary. It is true that U.S. mass media always suppress news about left wing, socialist or communist third parties.

Bernie switched from being a lifelong political independent espousing social democracy to a Democrat when he announced his candidacy in late May 2015. There were six candidates; he said that if he lost he would support the winner. Neither he nor anyone else anticipated how popular his candidacy would become. At the time, Clinton was considered a sure winner. By the time Clinton gained enough votes to secure the nomination in June, more than a hundred million adults not only heard his message but many of them — often for the first time — were won over to the radical views of a self-declared democratic socialist.  The U.S. socialist left has benefitted from Bernie’s openness and for his incredible ability to attract millions of young people to a quite mild social democratic banner.

It is important to understand Bernie’s goals, as we wrote in March (An Incredible Election Year in America — click on 3-13-16 Activist Newsletter): “The Democratic party liberal and left sector has been sharply constricted by the traditional leadership and the Clinton and Obama two-term administrations, despite the fact that liberalism in Democratic ranks has increased 17% since 2001, according to a Gallup poll last June. That means 47% of Democrats are socially liberal and economically moderate liberal…. Sanders seeks to motivate and lead the party left to demand and exercise considerably more political clout. The party hierarchy views this as an act of apostasy. Most funders equate it to a kick in the teeth.”

The political “revolution” Sanders called for was intended to transform the center right Democratic Party to once again stand as a center-left party such as existed during its two periods of social reform benefitting millions of working class, middle class and poor Americans — during the Great Depression, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the 1960s, led by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Many of his objectives, such as free college education, and generous family leave, have existed for decades in the social democratic countries.

Sanders did not propose scrapping capitalism but he did seek to modify neoliberalism by introducing some of the popular reforms that exist mainly in the Scandinavian countries and less so in Germany, France and occasionally elsewhere. He hopes that eventually the U.S. will become a democratic socialist society, but his job was to create an uprising within the Democratic party that might be a step in that direction.

Bernie had no intention to head the Green ticket or break his promise to support the winner of the primary in order to form an independent third party just a few months before the election. It takes at least a year or two of hard work by many people in 50 states, and a considerable amount of money, for a new third party to run a serious national campaign for presidential office.

Bernie Today

Sanders is now raising funds to support a number of progressive candidates for Congress who backed his campaign, the latest being Zephyr Teachout (New York); Rick Nolan (Minnesota); and Pramila Jayapal (Washington). Teachout is in our 19th congressional district in the Mid-Hudson Valley, and we and our local readers support her.

Bernie’s latest communication to millions of his supporters arrived a few days ago:

“Election days come and go, but the struggle for economic, social, racial and environmental justice continues. Together, we built something special and unprecedented through our presidential campaign. Now, we are going to take the next steps for our political revolution. We are building a new organization called Our Revolution. Our goal will be the same as in our campaign: we must work to transform American society by making our political and economic systems work for all of us, not just the 1%.”

Sanders has created a large constituency for further political advances against the erosion of what remains of true democracy and equality in the existing neocapitalist system. It is to be hoped that the genuine left in America will seriously seek to attract and organize members of this new force for intensive radical political activism and not simply for electoral politics.

As we end we recall two incidents at the convention leftists and progressives should never forget. First, the Democratic Party’s instructions to Clinton delegates to drown out Bernie delegates with a particular response if they began chanting unauthorized slogans. On Aug. 28, during a speech by retired Marine Corps General John Allen, a relatively small number of delegates began chanting “No More War ” and were quickly made inaudible by the insistent (and “authorized”), ultra-nationalist chant “USA, USA, USA….” Allen joined in at the microphone. The Republicans also had an unforgettable moment during a speech by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. As he was making the case that Clinton was a criminal, thousands began hatefully chanting, “Lock her up, Lock her up, Lock her up….”

We thought these passing incidents spoke volumes about both parties.

Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bombers have made another blow on the ISIS terrorist group outside the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor. The six Tu-22M3 bombers, which took off from an air base in Russia, have destroyed two ISIS command centers, six large ammunition depots, two tanks, four infantry fighting vehicles, seven SUVs with mounted machine guns, and also decimated the terrorist group’s manpower.

On August 14, the Jaish al-Fatah operation room has been continuing attempts to widen its tiny corridor to eastern Aleppo. Jabhat Fateh al-Sham-led forces attacked the al-Zahraa Neighborhood and the al-Zahraa Artillery Base, the 1070 Apartment Project and the Cement Plant. Jabhat Fateh al-Sham used few Suicide Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices. Heavy clashes continued overnight with initial reports that the militants captured 25 building blocks in the 1070 Apartment Project and seized the Cement Plant.

However, August 15 reports indicated that the Syrian army, the National Defense Forces and Hezbollah regained the Cement Plant and reversed Jabhat Fateh al-Sham’s gains in the 1070 Apartment Project. Both sides report “dozens of injured and killed” enemies in the clashes.

VIDEO

According to the ISIS-linked media outlet, Amaq Agency, 7 suicide bombers broke through a residential area near Al-Farouk Dam east of Aleppo where a U.S. military outpost and the operation room for Manbij operation were located. 3 bombers detonated explosives in a group of guards, mostly Kurdish fighters, other 4 entered the buildings. Before these 4 terrorists were neutralized, at least 41 US soldiers and Kurdish fighters had been killed and injured, according to Amaq.

On August 14, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced creation of the Al-Bab Military Council. This could indicate that developing the success in Manbij, the Kurds are going to advance on Al Bab in order to link the four cantons of Rojava along the Syrian-Turkish bordel-Bab has a population about 69,000. Its inhabitants are mostly Sunni Muslim Arabs.

Even with the significant superiority in manpower, military equipment and air power, and with support of the US Special Forces, the Kurdish-led SDF will face a stiff resistance there.

ISIS militants could easily launch flank attacks on SDF units advancing on Al-Bab. Furthermore, the liberation of Al Bab is far away from the political goals of Obama administration in Syria. The White House is seeking to show the success of American anti-terrorist operations by taking major ISIS strongholds – Raqqa and Mosul – in Syria and Iraq. Al Bab is just located in another direction.

Patterns have long since emerged.  We know that each illegal war of conquest is prefaced by a Public Relations campaign that demonizes the target country’s leader and its government as it lies about on-the-ground realities.  Muammar Gaddafi, for example, was presented to Western media consumers as a lunatic and despot. The Western narratives, however, were contradicted by the fact that he earned broad-based support from Libyans, all of whom enjoyed public services such as free healthcare and schooling, and a high standard of living.  

The same demonization campaign is being waged against the hugely popular Dr. Bashar al-Assad, the democratically –elected President of Syria.

Terrorist –embedded propagandists teach us that he is an evil dictator who kills his own people, and that “he must go”; however, credible evidence inverts this logic.

Henry Lowendorf, a member of the Executive Board of the U.S Peace Council’s Peace and Fact-Finding Delegation to Syria — recently returned from Syria — reports, that, “What we saw (in Syria) goes against everything we read in the United States.”

He repudiates the Western media’s demonization campaign against the government of President Assad and the Syrian Arab Army in these words:

“When you go to Syria, which I did last month, the popularity of the government and the Syrian Arab Army is rampant. It’s not out of some dream fantasy. It comes obviously from the government and the army being the only thing between living a secular life on the one hand and the hatred and violence of ISIS and the various other terrorist groups underwritten by the terrorist Saudis and US and their allies on the other. The refugees who don’t leave Syria do not flee to the terrorist side, they flee to the government side, in huge numbers. So would all of us in similar circumstances. Syrians do not want their country turned into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, or any of the other countries the US has liberated.”[i]

The reality is an inversion of the propaganda lies fed to Western audiences.  In fact, President Assad must stay, for the sake of civilization, and for the sake of destroying Western-backed terrorism.  Each time Empire succeeds in destroying another country, the problem of terrorism worsens – as might be expected. The destruction of Libya, for example, set the stage for the attempted destruction of Syria.

Weapons stolen from Libyan armouries, thanks to the invasion, were covertly shipped to Syria – all beneath the radar of the U.S Congress.

A recently declassified Department of Defense document[ii] indicates that,

“Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the Port of Benghazi, Libya, to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria”

And none of this is accidental. Sustainable Western open-source documentation demonstrates that the growth of terrorism is willful, and according to Western plans.

The propaganda lies, the false flags,  the terrorist-embedded NGOs , and the use of terrorist proxies to criminally destroy one country after another, is not only empowering terrorism world-wide, but it is also leading us to engineered conflict with nuclear-armed countries, in particular,  Russia.

Whereas the propaganda lies further the causes of barbarity and ignorance,  we need a redirection towards the polar opposite: towards trajectories that support civilization, progress, and the rule of law.

Prof. Chossudovsky explains in “America’s ‘Humanitarian War’ against the World” that

“What is consequently required is a massive redirection of science and technology towards the pursuit of broad societal objectives. In turn, this requires a major shift in what is euphemistically called ‘US Foreign Policy’, namely America’s global military agenda.”

We need to shift from Death Industries of the Military Industrial Complex, to Life Industries that serve, rather than destroy, humanity. We also need a strong anti-war movement based on a broad-based support of the truth, and a broad-based rejection of the “governing” lies.

Today, Cuban leader Fidel Castro is celebrating his 90th birthday. Although there are almost no blank spots in Castro’s biography, some facts of his life might have been forgotten. RT has decided to remember them.

Castro was always distinguished by his charisma, a feature which allowed him not only to implement a number of cardinal reforms in Cuba and bring the country to new heights in the fields of education, medicine, and tourism, but also make it into the Guinness Book of World Records, become a blogger, and even a hero in computer games.

Cigars and the beard

Many remember Fidel Castro for his beard and cigar. El Comandante was always proud of his beard and said that he would shave it only when the revolution finally triumphs.

“I don’t waste my time shaving. This would take about 15 minutes every day. This way, I can save a few days a year for important matters,” he once stated.

Castro always loved Havana cigars, so much that there was once an attempt to poison him through them. In 1986, however, the leader of the revolution had to give up this pernicious habit because of health problems. “The best thing you can do with a box of cigars is give them to the enemy,” he said then.

New Cuba

In the early 1960’s, the leader of the Island of Freedom ordered that all educational institutions be nationalized and a unified state education system be established. In 1961, 10 thousand schools were built. By 1995, the country’s literacy rate was 95%.

Following the revolution in 1959, the medical education system was reorganized. Cuba now has the lowest infant mortality rate on the entire American continent with the exception of Canada. Medical care on the island is now free.

Between 1989-1994, the reallocation of resources in the country led to the rapid growth of tourism, a sector of the economy which now brings in an average of $2 billion a year.

Guinness Book of World Records

On September 26th, 1960, Fidel Castro delivered a speech at the UN including the words “When the philosophy of plunder disappears, so will the philosophy of war.” In his speech, he explained the meaning of the Cuban Revolution and the essence of its reforms. His speech lasted 4 hours and 29 minutes, thus entering into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest speech ever delivered at the UN.

However, according to other sources, Castro’s longest speech ever delivered was at the Third congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1986, lasting 7 hours and 10 minutes.

In addition, Castro became a record-breaker for having survived 638 different assassination attempts. The majority of them, moreover, were characterized by extraordinary ingenuity, resembling scenes from James Bond films.

More than 600 assassination attempts

For example, the CIA planned hundreds of assassination attempts on El Comandante’s life using poisons. In 1960, cigars carrying deadly toxins were gathered to be given to the lover of fine cigars, Fidel himself.

Later, an attempt was made to put poison in Castro’s shoes by placing thallium salt in the soles. His diving suit as well, according to some reports, was once infected with lethal bacteria. But the man responsible for Castro’s outfits changed his mind at the last moment and gave El Comandante a different, safe suit.

Fidel’s lover, the CIA-recruit Marita Lorenz, was once complicit in an attempt to take his life. American intelligence gave her poisonous pills which she hid and dissolved in a jar of cream.

Fidel also managed to avoid being stabbed by a poisoned needle hidden in a ballpoint pen. One of the Cuban leader’s political employees intended to stab him with a poison-tipped needle during a meeting with American President John F. Kennedy. But the attempt failed.

Plans were also hatched to spoil Castro’s good reputation by getting him high on LSD during a live radio show. It was assumed that the drug would cloud the Cuban leader’s mind so that he would begin to talk nonsense and disappoint audiences. But this plan also failed.

Such unthinkable assassination attempts were also featured in the computer games Call of Duty: Black Ops and The Godfather 2, whose levels included missions to eliminate Castro.

Books, articles, and social networks 

Even after retiring and passing the baton to his brother Raul, Fidel Castro did not cease to surprise the public. He has retained a clear mind and publishes articles in the newspaper “Granma.”

Around 6 years ago, El Comandante registered an account on Twitter with the aim of surpassing the popularity of Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu’s accounts. Castro’s miniblog @reflexionfidel publishes his thoughts on current political events and is now subscribed to by nearly 500,000 people.

In 2010, Cuba  released the first part of his memoirs, “The Strategic Victory.” It is believed that he is now working on the second part of the book.

Translated from Russian by J. Arnoldski

During the week of August 8 both Republican Party nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton made policy speeches in the Detroit metropolitan area.

Trump addressed the Detroit Economic Club on August 8 where he put forward his program for the revitalization of the United States. The presidential candidate delivered the address at Cobo Conference Center in downtown Detroit.

In Detroit it is the best of times for the struggle aimed at eradicating racism and economic exploitation which has prompted the destruction of the housing, commercial, educational and municipal services sectors of the city. The movements for change in Detroit are taking place during the worst of times for the overwhelming majority of the population suffering from the above-mentioned imposed social ailments.

Outside the Trump event in downtown, demonstrators congregated over an area of two blocks with signs critical of the Republican candidate and his policies. Members of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) distributed signs criticizing the demagogic Trump. The UAW along with many trade unions typically pledges their support to the Democratic candidates for president and legislative offices irrespective of who they are.

This year the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posed a formidable challenge to Clinton, who served as a Senator for New York and as Secretary of State during the first administration of President Barack Obama. Clinton’s program is one of continuing the pro-Wall Street program of the Obama administration along with the increased military and intelligence interventions throughout the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Asia Pacific regions. Sanders, an independent democratic socialist, ran on a platform advocating national health insurance; the breaking up of large financial institutions; a different approach to the Palestine-Israeli war of the last seven decades; among other issues. Senator Sanders was quite critical during numerous debates over Clinton’s close relationship with Wall Street where she delivered numerous speeches for undisclosed amounts of money.

More Militant Voices in Detroit

Nonetheless, other organizations were present to lend their voices to the demonstration and political dialogue. Members of the Detroit chapter of Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST) youth group led chants denouncing Trump and his appeal to racism, neo-fascism and war. FIST is allied with the Moratorium NOW Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs, which has sought for the last eight years to put an end to the theft of tens of thousands of houses by the banks.

Trump’s speech inside of Cobo called for more of the same failed policies of the last several decades including the cutting of taxes for the rich and the failed promises of lowering taxes for the working class. These policies of cutting and even absolving the rich from paying taxes has been utilized to finance even deeper levels of exploitation and expropriation from the workers and oppressed peoples in the U.S.

In Detroit firms run by Dan Gilbert and Mike Illitch, two billionaires, have been given preferential treatment by federal, state and local governments for years. Their business model emphasizes prestige projects such as sports stadiums and entertainment complexes which facilitate the continuing forced removals of the African American and Latino communities. These top-down economic programs are championed by the corporate media which systematically ignores the plight of the oppressed and working class saying in essence what is good for business is beneficial to the masses.

The crowd outside of Cobo was not receptive to this message being enunciated by Trump. Some of the Trump supporters came into the anti-Republican demonstration flashing their signs and consequently creating tensions.

One white man raised the dreaded Confederate flag at the front of the anti-Trump gathering triggering a clash which took away the symbol of slavery, civil war and the Ku Klux Klan. This man eventually landed on the concrete where he had to be rescued by the Detroit police. Members of the crowd began chanting: “Nazi scum off our streets!” No arrests were made and this sent a strong message to the racists within the Trump campaign that some people are prepared to disarm them of their symbols as well as political program.

Clinton Brings Message of the Status Quo

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton spoke later that same week outside of Detroit in neighboring Macomb County. Pollsters say she is trailing behind Trump in the county which is majority white. Nonetheless, there are African Americans and Latinos moving into Macomb County, many of whom are from working class backgrounds.

Clinton championed the economic policies of the last eight years under Obama. Objectively, beyond the bailing out of the auto industry not very much can be said of the Democratic program that is favorable to the working class. Although the UAW would speak highly of Obama for carrying through the post-bankruptcy re-structuring of the auto industry and the preserving of industrial jobs, this bailout resulted in the severing of tens of thousands of jobs; the closing of auto dealership shedding more union work; and the growing of the UAW through two and three tier wage structures that sought to divide younger workers being hired in at wages half of those of veteran employees and with far few benefits. There have also been attacks on the concept of the eight-hour day which was a fundamental demand of the union since its inception.

Why the Workers and Oppressed Need Their Own Political Party

Consequently, both parties represent the capitalist class which has been hell-bent on lowering the standard of living of the workers and oppressed in their mad drive for profit. There was no program to repair the damage that has already been done in the recent period as it relates to home and job losses; guaranteeing full healthcare coverage to all people; the eradication of police brutality; ending imperialist wars and the closing of Pentagon military bases and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) field offices across the world.

In Michigan the water has been poisoned in Flint and the majority African American city needs the reconstruction of its infrastructure along with tens of thousands of jobs that were destroyed after the re-structuring of the auto industry from an earlier period during the 1980s, some three decades ago where both Democratic and Republican politicians failed to lift a finger to save the jobs and homes of these residents. Michigan was the only state in the U.S. which lost population in the last census period. Detroit’s population declined by 25 percent as a direct result of home foreclosures, evictions, utility shut-offs, small business failures and the crisis in an education system controlled by successive state administrations.

Clinton debated Sanders during the primaries in Flint yet nothing has been done to resolve the water crisis along with other economic problems in the city located some 70 miles north of Detroit. In Detroit itself despite the Democratic Party-allied politicians and trade union leaders, there has been nothing specific offered to the people as it relates to the declining infrastructure, racist manipulation by the courts and surrogate political establishment, and the failed system of public education.

These problems require political organizing independent of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Working class and oppressed peoples need an organization that can speak unequivocally in their own name—where the real enemies of the people can be exposed and dealt with in a decisive fashion.

The people of Michigan need good jobs, economic opportunities, decent education, healthcare, services for children and seniors, along with environmental quality.

The wars to be continued by the potentialities of a Clinton or Trump administration will not serve the interests of the masses. It is the ruling class that needs changing not its navigators, minions and surrogates.

Were Hillary Clinton’s medical records leaked to the public? Is Hillary Clinton really suffering from dementia, seizures and memory loss?

A new report indicates that Hillary Clinton’s medical records have been leaked, but not everyone agrees. Are the medical records fact or fiction?

According to the leaked medical records, Hillary Clinton allegedly suffers from Complex Partial Seizures and Subcortical Vascular Dementia. Included as symptoms Clinton is experiencing are blackouts, uncontrollable twitching and memory issues.

While the general consensus is the leaked medical records are fake, there is a bit of truth behind them.

The doctor named on the medical reports has been confirmed as one of Hillary’s doctors: Lisa R. Bardack.

Still, not everyone is convinced the medical records are fake. The following is a CBS News report from December 2013 reporting on Clinton’s health issues from 2012. Mentioned are two blood clots Clinton has been diagnosed with. One clot Clinton suffered in the ’90s. The other blood clot she was diagnosed with was in Dec. 2012. In a ABC News report, it was discussed that Hillary Clinton did have additional issues stemming from the concussion.

No one in Hillary Clinton’s camp would state what the additional issues or injuries she sustained were.

The statement of health was issued on July 28, 2015, and previously had been accessible through Scribd.

Since the controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding Clinton’s health have escalated, the document’s settings have been changed to private. According to Dr. Bardack’s 2015 medical statement, Hillary Clinton was in excellent health, reported Time.

Politico also reported on the 2015 report that was described as Hillary Clinton releasing her medical records for the campaign. With the allegations that Clinton is suffering from seizures and then the leaked medical report saying she does indeed suffer from seizures and dementia, calls were made for Clinton to release her medical records once and for all. In the Politico report that was based upon Dr. Bardack’s assessment, Hillary Clinton suffered a concussion due to fainting after being dehydrated from a virus. In addition to the Politico article, the Mount Kisco Daily Voice also reported on Clinton’s excellent bill of health in 2015. Also mentioned was the section regarding Clinton’s 2012 concussion.

“In December of 2012, Mrs. Clinton suffered a stomach virus after traveling, became dehydrated, fainted and sustained a concussion.”

Those who believe the newly released medical records are fake are comparing them to the 2015 bill of health. Many suggest the writing is different and point out there is official letterhead on the 2015 documents, but not the recent ones. Snopes reported that Hillary Clinton’s leaked documents were fake, but not everyone agrees. Snopes points out that the documents appeared briefly on a Twitter account @HillsMedRecords then quickly vanished. The dates on the leaked medical records are February 5, 2014 and March 20, 2014. Both dates are before the 2015 document.

The lack of letterhead on the leaked medical records has caused many people to believe they are fake. While there is great debate regarding Hillary Clinton’s health and fitness to run for office, there is one area it seems everyone can agree. Hillary Clinton should release her current medical records.

According to a new Rasmussen poll, people want Hillary Clinton to release her medical records. Some people are so convinced that Hillary Clinton is sick and dying, they’re using the hashtag #illary Clinton instead of Hillary. At this point, it might be the best way to quiet the rumors and stop the questions. Hillary Clinton has been seen in positions that make her appear old and weak. Is she really coughing nonstop? Is she suffering from a chronic cough or hyperthyroidism? Does she really have long-lasting damage from her previous brain injury? Are Hillary Clinton’s leaked medical records fact or fiction? What do you think?

The Guardian reports: “Children as young as seven have been sexually assaulted in official European refugee camps, the Observer has been told. The claims come as testimony emerges suggesting that some camps are so unsafe that youngsters are too terrified to leave their tents at night.” The article refers specifically to a government-run camp at the outskirts of Thessaloniki, Greece, holding about 1,400 refugees, most of them Syrians. Aid organizations claim that “the level of risk of sexual attack is so acute that women are too afraid to visit the camp toilets alone at night.”

One volunteer serving at the camp, alleged that some young girls had been effectively groomed by male gangs. He said an Iraqi family had to be moved to emergency accommodation outside the camp after their daughter was attacked. “The parents are still in disbelief over what happened. A man from one of the ‘mafia’ groups asked their seven-year-old daughter into their tent to play games on his phone and then zipped up the tent. She came back with marks on her arms and neck. Later the girl described how she was sexually abused. It has scarred a seven-year-old child for life,”

The Guardian also talked to Anna Chiara Nava of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Thessaloniki, who confirmed allegations of children being victims of sexual violence. She said they, MSF, were in regular contact with at least 10 women from the camp who had complained of sexual violence and explained that many occupants, including children, were too afraid to speak out. “It’s really hard for the unaccompanied minors – 16 and 17 years-old – to survive. It’s the survival of the fittest in there. In the evening and night, it’s impossible to find them [children] because they are hiding in the tents. The women are afraid. They complain that during the night and evening they cannot go to the toilet alone. They have all heard of reports of others being attacked.”

The Greek Government built a number of refugee camps near Thessaloniki after the informal one at Idomeni, near the Macedonian border, was closed in May. This followed the European Commission’s (EC) allocation of £71 million (€82 million) of humanitarian funding for emergency projects to help the 57,000 refugees stranded in official government camps throughout Greece.

Sputnik News – interview

Question:
Do you think this report [The Guardian] is trustworthy?

Peter Koenig: Yes, absolutely…

This is first of all a typical EU crisis – where nobody wants to be responsible, yet the EU are involved up to their neck with causing the refugee crisis.

Sexual assaults on innocent children scar them forever. It is one of the most horrible crimes humanity can commit. It shows how low ‘humanity’ has sunk – in the drift of constant wars, where human values of life have been eviscerated, due to the never ending war on terror, instigated by the West – not the Muslims, not the Middle East…. Instigated to keep the profit war machine churning out more weapons, more killing, more profit.

Europe together with the US and NATO keep destroying the Middle East, bombing it to rubble, creating a flood of refugees, whose closest place to survive is – unfortunately – their executioner himself, Europe. Then they (EU) reject the refugees – perhaps with the exception of Germany – but especially the Brits and the French – and leave the problem in the hands of a country whose borders are closest to the place of origin of the refugees, Greece.

Greece is a nation that the very EU – her brothers and sisters, have basically liquidated with debt and privatization of public assets – a country starving itself and striving for the sheer survival of more than 50% of its own population. With hardly any funds from the bureaucrats in Brussels, Greece is left to fend on her own for holding and caring of the refugees. The €82 million of humanitarian funding for emergency projects to help the 57,000 refugees stranded in official government camps throughout Greece, is hardly a drop on a hot stone – and certainly not enough to police and protect the camps from thugs and sexual assault as described by The Guardian.

These people [the refugees] are punished three-fold by Europe, first their livelihood is being destroyed, then they are crammed into refugee camps, where they are assaulted, sexually and otherwise, then rejected from seeking refuge, shelter and survival in the ‘clean and snottily rich’ European countries – for having done nothing, absolutely nothing; these refugees have committed no crime whatsoever.

This is European justice. This is just another reason why the EU is not fit to survive, is not reformable. The EU is despicably unhuman and has nothing to do with a union of countries. Brussels and especially the EC that calls most of the shots, is a club of extravagant high-paid non-elected bureau- and technocrats, working for the plutocracy, for the ultra-rich, with total neglect of the people – in this case the refugees, but also the European populace at large.

The EU should be dismantled as soon as possible. I can only hope and trust that BREXIT will actually happen and that it will contribute to hastening the pace of the dissolution of the European Union and its fake currency the Euro, modeled after the US-dollar, made out of thin air, based on nothing but debt; an instrument to enslave and impoverish countries and rob their public assets. Greece is a master example.

Question:What do you think should be done now? Should women and girls be placed in separate camps to protect them?

PK: As a first and emergency reaction – yes, absolutely. As an interim measure and since nothing substantial can be expected to come from Brussels in ‘useful time’, Greece and other countries in solidarity may fund this emergency step, eventually to be reimbursed by Brussels. But in the long run its clearly a question for the EU / Brussels to resolve, allocating appropriate funding – and first of all stop the profit-driven wars that create abject poverty and prompt the flow of refugees.

Question: What do you think Brussels reaction will be now? Will they actually do something, provide the resources for countries like Greece to deal with the refugee problem properly – or will they continue dragging their feet?

PK: Well, one would hope that a damning report like the one in The Guardian would actually incite Brussels to react, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they again would just drag their feet and shove the problem from one bureaucratic commission of non-elected technocrats to another – and nothing will happen.

I’m often thinking of the EU as a huge uncontrollable mob of adolescents, where nobody wants to be responsible but all want to claim somehow ‘credit’ for their ‘grandeur’ – they are incompetent for the task that they should fulfill.

It is almost unthinkable that something like this could happen in an individual government of one of the EU nations that were once sovereign nations – no longer – if they had to deal with the crisis on their own. In the first place, they probably would have never participated in this cruel, senseless Washington invented war on terror, a smoke screen for endless war and endless profit for the (mostly US-based) war industry and – Wall Street that finances it. But all of them, through the EU as a block, have been coopted or coerced into participating – and this against the will of the people they are supposed to represent. The fear of ‘economic sanctions’ for those who don’t behave is overwhelming. And economic sanctions can only work as long as the west is bound to the fraudulent US-controlled dollar-euro system.

Some of the ‘stronger’ countries, that could wage some influence, like Germany, should exert the necessary pressure on Brussels that funds are made available to properly protect these refugee camps, and especially women and girls – protect them from sexual and other abuse.

This is an absolute priority to deal with – it is a human catastrophe that deserves immediate and serious attention. Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the EC, himself should jump in the frying pan and find the resources to protect these victim of US – EU – NATO agression.

As a long term solution – I repeat what I said before, the EU and its common currency should be resolved, dismantled as soon as possible and something new created in its stead – a federation of truly solidary countries, inspired by Europeans themselves, without transatlantic influence and sabotage, as is the case with the current set-up of Europe – of the EU and the Euro.

Note

This is an approximate transcript of a Sputnik phone interview on 14 August 2016, based on an article in The Guardian (13 August) about child abuse in a Greek refugee camp.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media, TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. 

China’s Presidency of the G20 culminates next month with the Hangzhou Summit, a gathering of world leaders and an extraordinary opportunity to steer the world economy toward a more equitable, stable and productive architecture which achieves the goal of “win-win” cooperation, long advocated by China, and ultimately benefiting both developed and developing countries alike.  The theme of the Hangzhou Summit is:  “Toward an innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy.”

During the April 21 Statement to the United Nations High-Level Thematic Debate on Achieving Sustainable Development Goals, China’s  Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs and G20 Sherpa, Li Baodong stated:

“The G20 embraces development as a source of strength and stands ready to work with  developing countries to look for drivers of world economic growth.  Development shall be in the genes of the G20 agenda…Development is everywhere, be it in the macroeconomic policy, international trade and investment, innovative growth and global economic governance.  The G20 works for the benefit os not only its 20 member states, but the whole world.  We will listen to more voices, pool more wisdom, and make even bigger contribution to common development of mankind and greater prosperity of the world.”

In a diplomatic and intriguing statement to the press, at the United Nations, also on April 21, G20 Sous-Sherpa Wang Xiaolong captured the enormity of the challenge confronting the G20 Summit, and the entire world, stating:

“Eight years after the financial crisis, the world economy still is weak and fragile;  this is the slowest and weakest recovery process after a crisis, and one of the reasons is because the old modality of growth has largely run its course, and we need to find new drivers for the growth of the world economy.  An important source of growth is innovation and the development of the developing countries.”

Wang Xiaolong’s statement encapsulates the current global economic crisis which has reached staggering and unsustainable proportions, the crisis of burgeoning inequality denounced and unredressed almost a half century ago at the United Nations Eleventh Special Session on Economic Development, when Joachim Chissano, then Foreign Minister of Mozambique deplored the fact that:

“The existing economic order is profoundly unjust…It runs counter to the basic interests of developing countries.  We denounce any kind of economic prosperity or independence for part of mankind built on the dependence, domination and exploitation of the rest of mankind.”

The  severity of this persistent injustice was again denounced, three decades later, at the United Nations  General Assembly, on September 24, 2009 when Stjepan Mesic, then President of the Republic of Croatia stated:

“Our world is, finally, still dominated by an economic model which is self-evidently exhausted and has now reached a stage where it is itself generating crises, causing hardship to thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.  If one attempts to save this already obsolete model at any cost, if one stubbornly defends a system based on greed and devoid of any social note worthy of mention, the result can be only one:  social unrest harbouring the potential to erupt into social insurgence on a global scale.”

This relentless injustice of the current global economic architecture was directly confronted on April 21 by Li Baodong who stated:

“Inequality in the international system and governance mechanism is the biggest inequality of all…This year China has relaunched the G20 International Financial Architecture Working Group…held in-depth discussions on such issues as sovereign debt restructuring, global financial safety nets..We have also worked to promote inclusive finance and help to bring its benefit to developing countries and their vulnerable groups…As the biggest developing country, China knows full well that without the development of developing countries it would be impossible to invigorate the momentum of global development, tap into new and broader markets, or place the world economic recovery and growth on a solid footing.  True development will not be achieved until the world economies grow in a coordinated manner, various industries realize inter-connected and win-win progress, and people in all walks of life enjoy shared prosperity.”

At the Hangzhou G20 Summit China will encourage resolution of both the symptoms and root causes of economic problems, which inevitably morph into social and political problems.  China has courageously accepted and shouldered the Herculean task of persuading leaders and finance ministers of countries whose economies are based on outmoded and counterproductive zero-sum thinking of the imperative of change;  and recognizes the necessity of transforming that rigid mind-set into acknowledgment and acceptance of the fact that win-win cooperation is now the only hope for humanity’s survival.

The G20 Hangzhou Summit is at the cross-roads of world history, and a supreme opportunity to encourage world leaders to focus, predominantly on the paramount importance of investment in equitable global development, eschewing destructive investment tendencies which may inevitably provoke antagonism, confrontation and annihilating war.  It is impossible to ignore or minimize the fact that the G20 gathering of leaders of both developed and developing countries is taking place against a backdrop of countervailing  and sometimes ominous tendencies.

China’s task is daunting, but throughout the last and present century, China has shown almost superhuman ability to overcome enormous and virtually insurmountable obstacles, as a result of powerful strategic thinking, great determination, and formidable intelligence.  China’s success in restructuring its own economy and society, and ascending to global pre-eminence, is a basis for hope that their win-win approach to the new global economic architecture will prevail and gain acceptance by all participants in the G20 Summit.

Resurgence of the West’s Cold War Mentality 

Among the challenges faced by China, as a nation is the resurgence of a cold-war mentality in sectors of some of the countries participating in the G20 Summit.   Although this is a sensitive subject to raise, it would be tantamount to an ostrich hiding its head in the sand to omit the fact that despite fierce opposition by distinguished members of the US Congress, including Senator Diane Feinstein,and wiser leaders of the US Military, such as former Secretary of Defense, William Perry, the US is investing one trillion dollars in developing nuclear weapons in coming years.

“The diminished nuclear arms and nonnuclear weapons that Mr. Obama is developing could make the unthinkable more likely.  They make the weapons seem more usable, even if there’s no credible plan for how you control escalation. “ (Perry)

Britain’s new Prime Minister Theresa May recently supported Britain’s investment of 51 billion dollars in development of new nuclear weapons, and Germany has now pledged to invest 148 billion dollars in military development.

These provocative military investments by economies which prioritize profit maximization to the exclusion of all other considerations could precipitate another arms race, and ultimately Armageddon, for it is not possible to ignore the fact that war is one of the most profitable “ïndustries” of all for the miniscule group of arms merchants.

Further, the US is investing an exorbitant sum of money in the Thaad missile system based in the Republic of Korea, despite enraged domestic protest within the Republic of Korea against this provocative military expenditure, an increased militarization of the Korean peninsula which disrupts and destabilizes the geopolitical balance of North Asia, and constitutes a grave threat to the security of both China and Russia.  The reach of the Thaad X Band is so wide (almost 2,000 kilometers) that it is disingenuous to allege, and to expect anyone to believe that the target is the DPRK.

Five percent of the world’s military budget could fund the entire United Nations 2030 Agenda, transforming the world into a virtual paradise, funding research to discover the cure for terminal diseases, providing healthy environments and living spaces for everyone on the planet, and eliminating many of the root-causes of the now global scourge of terrorism.  One major war could obliterate all successful development efforts and accomplishments by the United Nations.

With China’s concentrated and compelling focus on development and win-win cooperation, it will be their Presidency’s ultimate triiumph to persuade the leaders of the G20 gathered in Hangzhou that investment in global development and human capital is a wiser and more lucrative long-term use of their resources than recklessly and mindlessly squandering trillions of dollars on life-destroying weapons, the result of which is inevitably fatal for humanity.  China’s victory at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou will be to persuade the participants of the entire conference that win-win cooperation is not only “the right thing to do, but it is the smart thing to do.

America’s “Humanitarian War” against the World

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 14 2016

We are not dealing with piecemeal military and intelligence operations. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Asia Pacific region. A US-NATO war on Russia, China and Iran is part of the US presidential election debate.

Donald Trump and the ISIS Factor

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 13 2016

Ever straddling that fine line between the absurd and the puncturing revelation, Donald J. Trump’s “ISIS” remarks about the Obama administration and the Democrat presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, were vintage.  “[Obama] was the founder of ISIS absolutely, the way he removed our troops. … I call them [Obama and Hillary Clinton] co-founders.”

Political Assassinations – The “New Normal” Trend Weapon of the Global Elites?

By Peter Koenig, August 14 2016

Assassinations to reach an objective is not new for the all-powerful. The practice has been going on at least for centuries, if not for millennia, but it has intensified drastically in the last fifty years, and it is becoming ever bolder, as the rulers of the Anglosphere tighten their grip on humanity – on Mother Earth and her resources.

Rethinking The Cold War

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, August 13 2016

The Cold War began during the Truman administration and lasted through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations and was ended in Reagan’s second term when Reagan and Gorbachev came to an agreement that the conflict was dangerous, expensive, and pointless.

Bayer AG Makes “Bee Contraceptives”. It’s the German Chemical Company Which Absorbed Monsanto

By F. William Engdahl, August 15 2016

Most will wonder what I mean when I say Bayer AG, the German chemicals and drug company, the same one that just absorbed Monsanto, makes bee contraceptives. This is precisely what a newly-published, peer-reviewed scientific study confirms. Contraceptives for bees are not good for the world, no better than another product invented in the labs of Bayer, namely heroin. Bayer makes a class of insect killers known as neonicotinides. Their free use worldwide threatens bee pollination and the entire food chain.

The label ‘conspiracy theorist’ is used by Western Establishment gatekeepers as a means of shutting down debate and smearing those who have the temerity to challenge elite-friendly narratives. 

As I argued in an Op-Edge last year, there’s a great irony here. Over the last twenty years or so, the biggest pushers of conspiracy theories (CTs) have been Western Establishment gatekeepers themselves.

In fact, the most outlandish, fact-free and downright dangerous ‘CTs’ have been promoted by those who are the quickest to yell “conspiracy theorist!” at others.

So here are the top ten ‘acceptable’ Western establishment conspiracy theories. If you peddle them you won’t be labelled a ‘crank’ or nut-job’, but be hailed as an ‘expert’ who may even be deserving of a column in a ‘serious newspaper’ like the Washington Post, or the London Times. And who knows, you might even get a lucrative offer from a top publishing house to write a book about conspiracy theories.

1. Iraq has WMDs which threaten the world!

The most deadly conspiracy theory of them all – one which led to an illegal invasion and the destruction of a sovereign state and the deaths of up to 1m people. But the people who promoted it paid no professional penalty. Thirteen years on, the ‘punditocracy’ in the US and UK is still dominated by those who assured us Saddam had WMDs (and also that the secular, cigar-smoking Sound of Music lover had links to al-Qaeda). Remember that the next time you see a smug, self-regarding member of the neocon elite journos club loftily accuse someone they regard as their social and intellectual inferior of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’.

2. Iran’s developing nukes!

Since the early 90s we’ve been told the Islamic Republic is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, or has already got them. The claims made repeatedly over the past 25 years by Israeli PM Netanyahu have been echoed by the same bunch of uber-hawks who pushed conspiracy theory 1. If you assert, without any evidence that say, Zambia is on the brink of developing nukes, you’ll be called a nutcase. But if you assert, without any evidence, that Iran is doing the same, then you’ll greatly increase your chances of being invited as an ‘expert’ into the studios of Fox News or Newsnight.

3. Jeremy Corbyn deliberately sabotaged the ‘Remain campaign’ in Britain’s EU referendum.

This has been a popular conspiracy theory peddled in elite Blairite circles in the UK this summer. The same anti-Corbyn crowd who tell us that the left-wing Labour Party leader is a massive turn-off with voters, blame said Labour Party leader for not doing more to persuade Britons to vote to stay in the EU!

In fact, Corbyn’s qualified support for the EU was much more in tune with public opinion than the Blairites’ EU fanaticism. Labour under Corbyn did deliver a majority vote for Remain among its supporters. Meanwhile, Islington, where Corbyn has his own seat, registered the sixth best result for Remain (75.2 percent) in the country. Some ‘sabotage’, eh, folks?

4. Assad is helping/working with ISIS and wants them to expand.

This one has been pushed by and large by the same people who pushed CTs 1 and 2 above. The theory says that the wicked Syrian tyrant wanted ISIS to gain territory in order for him to present himself as the ‘good guy’ in the conflict.

However, we’ve learned from declassified secret US intelligence documents from 2012 that the prospect of a ‘Salafist principality’ being established in eastern Syria was “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want” as it would “isolate the Syrian regime”. But let’s not mention evidence that it was Assad’s opponents – and not Assad – who welcomed the rise and expansion of ISIS.

That will only be dismissed as a conspiracy theory’!

And let’s ignore the Syrian Army’s liberation of Palymra from ISIS as well, shall we? It just doesn’t fit the ‘Why Assad won’t fight ISIS narrative!

5. Russia is providing ISIS with an air force

In October 2015, after Russia had started air strikes on terrorist targets in Syria, a new variation of Conspiracy Theory 4 started to circulate. Russia, we were told, was also helping ISIS and giving the Islamic State an air force!

Yet when a Russian passenger airliner was taken down by an ISIS/ISIL bomb later that month, we were told that it was a ‘warning shot’ for Moscow. If Russia was helping Islamic State/Daesh and providing it with an air force in Syria, why on earth would the group target a Russian plane?
As I wrote at the time: “You can’t say on one day that Russia is helping ISIS and that ISIS is gaining ground because of Russian actions and the next day claim that ISIS is bombing a Russian airline because they are, er.. angry with Russia”.

Or rather you can, if you’re a neocon who peddles outlandish anti-Russian conspiracy theories.

6. Trotskyists are taking over the Labour Party!

Record numbers of people are joining the Labour party to support leader Jeremy Corbyn, an anti-war democratic socialist whose policies represent a clean break with Blairism. And guess what?- these new members are disciples of a Russian revolutionary who died over 75 years ago!

Labour’s membership surged by 100,000 this summer – whoever would have thought there were so many Trotskyists in Britain! It’s all the more surprising given that the main Trotskyist party, the SWP, only has around 6,000 members.

According to Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson, who opposes Corbyn, Trotskyist entrists’ are “twisting the arms” of young members. Perhaps they’re also threatening these young members with a spell in the Red Army…?

‘Trots under the bed’ is the 2016 variation of ‘Reds under the Bed’ for McCarthyite conspiracy theorists in the Labour Party, who are desperate to restrict party democracy and return to elite-friendly Tory-lite, pro-war policies.

7. Russia was behind the DNC email leak

No evidence has yet been produced that the Kremlin was responsible for the leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee, so let’s just push this conspiracy theory 24-7 shall we? It concerns Russia, an ‘official enemy’, so no need to wait for little things like facts, right? As Glenn Greenwald noted: “Democrats not only treated this evidence free conspiracy theory as Truth, but following the Clinton campaign, proceeded to smear Wikileaks as a Kremlin operation”.

8. Putin orchestrated football hooliganism in the European Football Championships to get Britain out of the EU

This has to be a strong contender for the nuttiest CT of 2016. Russia is very keen for Western sanctions to be lifted. So what does the Russian Prez do? He gets Russian football hooligans to attack England supporters in Marseille. And this apparently will make it more likely that Britain will vote to leave the EU.

I’m sure there were millions of people in the UK who read about English and Russian fans fighting each other in France, who turned to their partners and said ‘That does it. I’m voting for Brexit on Thursday’!

What a load of (foot)balls.

9. Donald Trump is a Russian agent

The argument in the West against Donald Trump goes: Since the Republican presidential contender does not seem keen on starting WW3 with Russia over Ukraine or Syria, he must therefore be a Russian agent! Either a ‘witting’ one or an ‘unwitting’ one!

We’ve even had claims that The Donald is a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ who is secretly working either for Russia, or for Hillary Clinton.

Again, peddle these evidence-free CTs in the US or UK and you won’t lose your credibility as a ‘respected commentator’. Far from it. But if you argue that Tony Blair or David Cameron were agents of the US – either ‘witting’ or ‘unwitting’ on account of their ‘pro-US policies’ you’d face ridicule and career death. Proving once again, that some conspiracy theories are more equal than others.

10. Dr Jill Stein is a Kremlin shill!

The Green Party candidate in the US Presidential Election is attracting plenty of support from progressives who can’t see what’s progressive about Wall Street-funded and neocon supported Hillary Rodham Clinton. So guess what? As her popularity rises, Dr Stein’s been smeared as a Kremin shill and is accused having ties to Vladimir Putin.

The ‘evidence’? Well, like Trump (see CT No 9), she doesn’t seem keen to start WW3, and wait for it, she attended, along with a lot of other public figures, the RT 15th Anniversary conference in 2015.

Going to Moscow and not wanting war with Russia – or indeed with anyone else – is apparently unacceptable, and enough to get another ‘acceptable’ Establishment conspiracy theory going, folks!

Follow Neil Clark on Twitter @NeilClark66

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative.

He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.

He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

 Most will wonder what I mean when I say Bayer AG, the German chemicals and drug company, the same one that just absorbed Monsanto, makes bee contraceptives. This is precisely what a newly-published, peer-reviewed scientific study confirms. Contraceptives for bees are not good for the world, no better than another product invented in the labs of Bayer, namely heroin. Bayer makes a class of insect killers known as neonicotinides. Their free use worldwide threatens bee pollination and the entire food chain. 

In an article worthy of the convoluted and deceptive logic of the New York Times that he is so fond of criticizing, Noam Chomsky, together with John Halle, has published a piece on his website shilling for the election of Hillary Clinton.  “An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting)” also comes with a most unusual addendum: “Note: Professor Chomsky requests that he not be contacted with responses to this piece.”

Since personal responses have been ruled out, I will respond in this public forum.

Chomsky begins by writing that “presidential elections continue to pose a dilemma for the left in that any form of participation or non-participation appears to impose a significant cost on our capacity to develop a serious opposition to the corporate agenda served by establishment politicians.”  Meaning: there’s a price to pay for voting or not voting – at least there “appears” to be.  Such an indeterminate, truistic beginning is not an auspicious start for a linguist.

He then tells us that “many” regard the most effective response to be to vote for the”lesser evil” (LEV) Democrat in competitive “swing” states. Who the “many” are is left unsaid.

“Before fielding objections,” he continues, “it will be useful to make certain background stipulations with respect to the points [the eight point brief] below.”  He implies that others will make objections when the only objections are those Chomsky will make himself, only to shoot them down. This is a classic rhetorical device used to conceal the use of straw –man argumentation.  And in any case, he said at the start that he doesn’t want to get any responses, which would include objections.

He then tells us “that since changes in relevant facts require changes in tactics, proposals having to do with our relationship to the ‘electoral extravaganza’ should be regarded as provisional.”  Meaning: we (whoever that is) can change our minds if “relevant facts” emerge showing that Clinton’s foreign policy “could possess a more serious menace than that of Trump.”  “Could” suggests possibility, not past fact, and in any case, “most of us not already convinced that that is so will need more evidence …. though it’s a bit hard to know whether those making this suggestion [voting for Trump] are intending it seriously.” Meaning: Clinton’s foreign policy is less a menace than Trump’s, despite her track record, and serious people should vote for her. That “relevant facts” and “more evidence” might emerge is pure nonsense, since the facts are in.  “We” aren’t going to be changing our minds..

For those who choose the “politics of moral witness,” whether religious or secular leftists, and abstain from voting, they are about “feeling good” about themselves, see voting as a form of self-expression, and don’t care about others.  “When they reject LEV on the grounds that ‘a lesser of two evils is still evil’ they miss the point,” he claims.  “Leaving aside the obvious rejoinder [as he doesn’t leave it aside] that this is exactly the point of lesser evil voting – i.e. to do less evil,” Chomsky makes his point, not theirs, in an act of verbal jiu-jitsu.  “Moral witness” people decide to avoid choosing any evil by abstaining from a double-bind.  Chomsky, however, continues with his straw-man legerdemain by writing that “those reflexively denouncing advocates of LEV on a supposed ‘moral’ basis should consider that their footing on the high ground may not be as secure as they often take for granted may be the case.”  Thus he accuses “those” – whoever they are – of doing what he is doing, though his position does not rely on a ‘moral’ basis (his quotation marks speak volumes) but on serious intelligent strategy.  He is not like them; he is not the type to make “frivolous and poorly considered electoral decisions [that] impose a cost.”  His high ground is thoughtful, sound judgment.

He concludes by claiming that anyone serious about radical change must agree with his logic and his “cost/benefit strategic accounting.”  “Those on the left who ignore it, or dismiss it as irrelevant, are engaging in political fantasy and are an obstacle to, rather than ally of, the movement that now seems to be materializing.”  This bit of guilt-tripping rhetoric, with another ambiguous usage – “seems” – is typical of his entire argument.

As for his “8-Point Rationale,” it can be summed up in a few sentences.

Be practical, not moral, in making your decisions.

Don’t think of the election and your vote as part “of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.”

Donald Trump is an evil menace whose policies will impose terrible suffering “on marginalized and already oppressed populations.” These sufferings have “a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will [no use of the past tense, as though she has no foreign policy history] result from a Clinton presidency.”

That’s why you should vote for Hilary Clinton.

If you don’t, and Trump wins, you will be justly criticized.

If the left doesn’t help elect Clinton, it “will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.”  What this core is, and how a President Clinton would contribute to its achievement, is left unspoken.

So if your Hobson’s choice is to abstain from voting and thereby not assure a Clinton victory, you are a bad leftist.

As for Jill Stein, she doesn’t figure in the professor’s lecture.  A vote for her isn’t practical.

As the U.S. empire exhausts itself on wars in the Middle East and provocations in Asia and Eastern Europe, the “democracy” and “free market reforms” that are a hallmark of the Anglo-American system are becoming more and more apparent to the rest of the world.

One hallmark of Western imperialism has been the spread and even the mandate of Big Ag GMO seeds where the Anglo-American empire cannot spread itself by corruption, bribes and covert means, militarily conquered nations are often forced to abandon traditional agriculture in favor of “biotechnology” particularly products that belong to multinational corporations like Monsanto. As a result, those nations who have some concept of the Anglo-American game plan, have moved to claw back agricultural rights and practices while others have wisely banned GMOs from within their borders completely.

Those nations, of course, have found themselves under complete attack. While Syria is perhaps the most well-known victim in 2016, Russia, also painted as a villain by the U.S. media, has been increasingly resistant to “free market reforms” and the promotion of GMOs having banned the production, and importation of GMOs earlier this year.

But Venezuela has remained firm and just last year passed what is referred to as the Seed Law. A law that banned GMO seeds from being imported or produced in the country. Yet now, in August 2016, the future of the law itself is in question. This is because “opposition representatives” who are now a majority of seats in the Venezuelan Congress are looking to repeal it.

This has many in Venezuela concerned, since the Seed Law was widely popular amongst citizens, farmers, activists and nationalists. Eisamar Ochoa, spokesperson for Venezuela Free of Transgenics, told RT, “the new majority in the National Assembly serves the interests of the trans-nationals and the big monopolies of the agribusiness sector, this is why they have expressed their intention to repeal the bill.”

If the Seed Bill is repealed, [lawmakers] would be handing out the seeds, which represent a strategic good for food sovereignty, to the agribusiness sector like Monsanto.

Ochoa is exactly right when she claims that the opposition representatives are in the pockets of Big Ag.

Although Venezuela and the United States are held together by joint business interests involving petroleum exports and imports, this fact has done nothing to soften the tension between the two governments. Venezuela is, after all, the biggest supplier of petroleum to the United States. In turn, the United States is Venezuela’s biggest customer.

Nevertheless, both countries have been at constant diplomatic war since 2010 due to Chavez’ rejection of the nomination of Larry Palmer by the Obama administration and Washington’s subsequent dismissal of the Venezuelan ambassador in response. In February, 2014, President Maduro expelled three American diplomats. Maduro had expelled U.S. diplomats back in October, 2013 over what he described as a “US plot.” The plot was clear enough, as the US consular staff that was subsequently expelled had previously met with opposition forces and labor leaders in the southern state of Bolivar as well as the opposition Governor of Amazonas. On February 25, 2014, the United States announced that it was expelling Venezuelan diplomats in response.

Furthermore, the imperialist US sanctions regarding countries, banks, businesses,and individuals that do business with Iran were applied to the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), in May 2011 after the US State Department claimed that PDVSA delivered two cargo shipments of refined petroleum products worth approximately $50 million to Iran between the months of December and March 2010-2011.

In addition, as NewsMax reports, “The U.S. also imposed penalties on Venezuela’s Military Industries Co. for violating the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act by selling or buying sensitive equipment and technology related to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missile systems.”

Even more so, Chavez’ government, in 2002, was briefly overthrown as a result of a coup largely supported by the United States. This foreign-backed coup attempt involved the mobilization of large numbers of “swarming adolescents” as well as snipers who fired on the marches, which was subsequently blamed on Chavez, thus fanning the flames of chaos and outrage. This is the same method seen in the attempted destabilizations in Syria and Ukraine. (see here also)

Although Chavez was able to regain control of the presidency and the government within a mere 48 hours, such an affront to Venezuelan sovereignty and personal power is not likely to be forgotten by the Venezuelan government. In turn, the fact that the United States is ready and willing to back opposition leaders capable of storming the capitol and taking power is not likely to be forgotten by individuals seeking to do so.

This was precisely the attempt made by the United States and Anglo-American networks during the last Presidential election when Chavez was still alive and campaigning for another term against Western agent Henrique Capriles Radonski who openly stated his favoritism toward dismantling many of the social programs developed by Chavez.

Whatever one may have thought about Chavez or the Venezuelan government, it was clear enough that the Radonski campaign was a tentacle of Western intelligence and NGO networks.

As Lee Brown of Venezuela Analysis wrote at the time,

However there are obvious concerns that this fits neatly with the objectives of those within the right-wing opposition in Venezuela who are planning for the non-recognition of the coming elections if, as expected, Hugo Chavez wins. With the polls showing strong leads for Hugo Chavez, a campaign is already underway by sections of the right-wing opposition coalition to present any electoral defeat as being down to Chavez-led fraud. This has seen baseless attacks on the independent National Electoral Council (CNE,) which has overseen all of Venezuelans’ elections described as free and fair by a range of international observers. The opposition has announced plans to place tens of thousands of ‘witnesses’ at polling stations on election day and then, illegally to release its own results ahead of the official results in a clear bid to discredit them. These plans have sharpened fears that opposition-led disruptions and destabilisation will follow their defeat. This could easily meet Duddy’s condition of ‘an outbreak of violence and/or interruption of democracy’.

The “Duddy” that Brown makes mention of in his quote is a reference to Patrick Duddy, the former Ambassador to Venezuela, writing for the Council on Foreign Relations in a paper entitled “Political Unrest in Venezuela.” In this paper, Duddy provided a clear list of possible military, financial, and political contingency measures to be taken after the October 7 elections were held, essentially giving voice to a variety of opportunities which could be seized upon in order to foment the appearance of a popular uprising in the event of a Radonski defeat. The paper, in short, was a manual of suggestions for the implementation of a coup against the wishes of the Venezuelan people.

In the end, Radonski was defeated and the immediate public rioting that Duddy and the Anglo-American networks hoped for did not take shape. However, the destabilization effort that Duddy and the CFR called for in Duddy’s paper is beginning to take shape in Chavez’ absence.

After Chavez’s death and the subsequent campaign between Nicolás Maduro and Radonski, the vote count returned a much smaller margin of victory for Maduro than Chavez had enjoyed. Radonski, predictably, refused to concede defeat and claimed that the elections had been rigged.

Thus, while the internal debate surrounding the election results intensifies inside Venezuela, Radonski traveled to Colombia to meet President Juan Manuel Santos, a staunch ally of the United States. The visit was largely seen as an attempt to shore up international support for the planned coup.

Still, Radonski was quite confident that the Maduro government would fall and that he would be placed as leader. “I think this government, in the current conditions of illegitimacy added to a deep economic crisis it’s showing no intention of addressing, is going to cave in,” Capriles said.

As a result, Maduro responded to Radonski with accusations that he was nothing more than a destabilization agent for “right wing” actors wishing to overthrow the leftist government. Tensions both inside and outside the country began to rise with diplomatic ties being “re-examined” between Venezuela and Colombia as a result of the Radonski PR move as well as growing pro-Radonski supporters demonstrating in the streets. Violent clashes between protesters and the government during this time resulted in at least three deaths.

In early 2014, protests and demonstrations are once again took place all acrossVenezuela with Radonski positioning himself to seize power.

With this in mind, it is important to note that Radonski was and still is seen as being much more “market-friendly” by Western banking circles. In fact, analysts from Credit Suisse, Casey Reckman and Igor Arsenin, stated to Bloomberg News in 2012 that, “A Capriles victory would be a good outcome from the market’s perspective, in our view, as he seems to be a more viable presidential candidate than the opposition has presented previously. He espouses a gradualist, inclusive, left-of-center but market friendly approach.”

Translating the above statement to layman’s terms, both Chavez and now Maduro represent a threat to the Anglo-American imperialist strategy because of their refusal to engage in unrestrained privatization. Radonski represented a much better option due to his support for, at the very least, privatization and “free market” tendencies.

The Patrick Duddy Paper

As mentioned above, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Patrick Duddy, published a paper in the official CFR magazine, entitled “Political Unrest In Venezuela,” in which he provided a clear list of possible military, financial, and political contingency measures to be taken after the elections of October 7, 2012.

Duddy cited the repeated warnings made by Radonski during the campaign regarding the possibility of chaos, destabilization, violence and even civil war if he fails to win the election in order to suggest that these conditions may arise out of Chavez’ sabotage of Venezuelan elections. However, the reality is that the violence and chaos that would have ensued over election results was much more likely to be a legitimate and organic reaction to the election of Radonski who is seen as much more favorable toward dismantling many of the social programs that Chavez heavily invested in. Even Duddy admits in his paper that a Chavez loss might result in riots by government workers “before Capriles can be inaugurated.”

In his paper, Duddy provided several instances that he believed were “Warning Indicators” of violence and political unrest as a result of the Venezuelan presidential elections. Among these indicators are those such as the following:

• Chavez dies or an announcement is made that his death is imminent.
• Violent crime is allowed to surge in the major cities before the election.
• Weapons are distributed to the militia.
• Basic food items disappear.
• Remaining independent media are closed and/or prominent journalists are detained.
• Sharp divisions within Chavismo surface publicly, suggesting insiders know Chavez is failing.
• A senior political figure close to either Chavez or Capriles is assassinated.
• Local supplies of gasoline are interrupted.

Although many of these conditions have been predicted or are quite possible inside the United States in coming years, Duddy viewed their presence in Venezuela as the signal of apocalyptic social upheaval. More importantly, Duddy represented this upheaval as vital to the interests of the United States – particularly those involving the need of the U.S. “to promote democracy, increase regional cooperation, combat narcotics, and protect its economic interests in the region.”

For clarification purposes, one may translate these interests to mean “to install puppet regimes via destabilization programs, create U.S. regional hegemony, further the drug trade for intelligence purposes (while imprisoning members of the general public), and protecting private banking and corporate interests operating or wishing to operate in the region.”

A Radonski presidency would not have been the first time a prominent Venezuelan politician has cooperated with the Anglo-Americans. During the aforementioned coup against Chavez in 2002, Radonski, who was Mayor of Caracas’ Baruta district, was implicated in the detention of Ramon Rodriquez Chacin, Venezuela’s Interior Minister. Although the charges of fomenting violence on the Cuban embassy during the coup attempt were ultimately dropped, the suspicion surrounding Radonski’s allegiances remain. After all, the U.S. State Department was quick to go to bat for Radonski when his trial was set to take place, claiming that his case was indicative of Venezuelan Human Rights abuses.

With this in mind, Duddy went on to write that the possibility of violence in the event of a Chavez victory was very real. The question facing the United States, according to Duddy, then becomes “What can we do about it?” Inside the pages of “Political Unrest in Venezuela,” he attempted to answer this question or, more accurately put, how the United States could best take advantage of such a situation.

In the section of the paper entitled, “Mitigating Options,” Duddy lamented the fact that “The likelihood of success for unilateral U.S. efforts is low;” which itself suggests that, if support existed, unilateral U.S. action would be given serious consideration. However, it is important to point out that Duddy did not rule out unilateral action as much as he merely observed that support for it would be low.

Nevertheless, Duddy stated that “multilateral efforts that include other important regional players are far more likely to influence Venezuelan behavior.”

Thus, it is important to note that, among Duddy’s “Mitigating Options,” there falls the subcategories of diplomatic, economic and financial, and military options.

In terms of diplomacy, Duddy suggested that the U.S., “together with like-minded nations . . . . . demand that the OAS declare Venezuela in breach of its obligations as a signatory of the Inter-American Democratic Charter and encourage a secretary-general–led mission to Caracas.” He also proposes that the United States involve the United Nations, the European Union, and “other international partners,” in order to “to explicitly endorse regional efforts to restore democracy.”

Unfortunately, Duddy did not define what a “regional effort to restore democracy” would look like. However, considering the recent history of Anglo-American interference, along with other international “coalitions of the willing,” we can only imagine that the results would bring little benefit to the Venezuelan people.

In terms of “Economic and Financial Options,” Duddy wrote that, in the event of violence or “interruption of democracy,”

the United States could freeze individual bank accounts of key figures involved or responsible and seize assets in the United States. It could also arrange for the proceeds of Venezuelan government-owned corporate entities like CITGO to be held in escrow accounts until democracy is restored and encourage other important trading partners (i.e. Canada, Spain, France, Brazil) to do the same.

He also suggests that the “United States could block access to CITGO’s refining facilities in the United States and consider prohibiting PDVSA oil sales to the United States while the government’ status is uncertain.”

In other words, Duddy proposed that the United States seize, freeze, and otherwise sanction Venezuelan assets until the election results are established to the satisfaction of the Anglo-American oligarchy. Clearly, a Chavez government did not fit the accepted mold formed by the shadow government currently guiding world society.

With this in mind, the next section of Duddy’s paper, entitled “Military Options,” is much more concerning.

For instance, in this section, Duddy wrote that,

The United States could encourage other Latin American militaries, as well perhaps as the Spanish, to communicate to the Venezuelan military the importance of complying with constitutional mandates, respecting human rights, and preserving democracy. While Chavez loyalists dominate the Venezuelan high command, it is not clear to what extent they control the middle ranks. Nor is it clear to what extent the military’s loyalty to Chavez’s Bolivarian movement would trump other considerations. In the abortive coup of 2002 the military temporarily removed Chavez but also restored him to power.

In this short section, Duddy did more than simply hint that the United States, along with other Latin American client states should “encourage” the Venezuelan military to depose Hugo Chavez and install a different government. Notice that nowhere does Duddy suggest the possibility that Radonski might have been the culprit in contested elections and post-election violence. The reason for this is that Radonski was not the target of the Anglo-American destabilization efforts – Chavez was. It is also ironic because Radonski had himself been involved in the instigation of political violence in the past.

Indeed, Duddy’s interpretation of “encouragement,” taken in the context of recent NATO-related adventures, sounds dangerously close to “direction” and outright “involvement.”

Of course, the entire purpose of Duddy’s paper seems to have been a preparation at the academic level for a another coup attempt in Venezuela using “contested” elections as a justification. Much like the destabilizations taking place all over the world, particularly in Syria and Ukraine, the Anglo-Americans appear were posturing for political, financial, proxy, or even direct involvement in the domestic affairs of yet another sovereign nation using civil unrest as a justification. More interesting still is the fact that the civil and political unrest used to justify this involvement was fomented by the Anglo-American intelligence networks to begin with.

Eva Golinger, a well-respected Venezuelan-American researcher and staunch supporter of former President Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, recognized the foreign-backed nature of the protests which began taking place across Venezuela in late 2013, early 2014. In her article, “Venezuela Beyond the Protests: The Revolution is Here to Stay,” Golinger writes,

Those protesting do not represent Venezuela’s vast working-class majority that struggled to overcome the oppressive exclusion they were subjected to during administrations before Chavez. The youth taking to the streets today in Caracas and other cities throughout the country, hiding their faces behind masks and balaclavas, destroying public buildings, vehicles, burning garbage, violently blocking transit and throwing rocks and molotov cocktails at security forces are being driven by extremist right-wing interests from Venezuela’s wealthiest sector. Led by hardline neo-conservatives, Leopoldo Lopez, Henrique Capriles and Maria Corina Machado — who come from three of the wealthiest families in Venezuela, the 1% of the 1% — the protesters seek not to revindicate their basic fundamental rights, or gain access to free health care or education, all of which are guaranteed by the state, thanks to Chavez, but rather are attempting to spiral the country into a state of ungovernability that would justify an international intervention leading to regime change.

[…]

Ironically, international media has been portraying these protesters as peaceful victims of state repression. Even celebrities, such as Cher and Paris Hilton have been drawn into a false hysteria, calling for freedom for Venezuelans from a “brutal dictatorship”. The reality is quite different. While there is no doubt that a significant number of protesters in the larger marches that have taken place have demonstrated peacefully their legitimate concerns, the driving force behind those protests is a violent plan to overthrow a democratic government.

Golinger also points out that the three main leaders of the protests were the same individuals who were instrumental in leading the 2002 coup attempt against Chavez. She states,

Leading efforts to overthrow Chavez were the very same three who today call for their supporters to take to the streets to force President Nicolas Maduro from power. Leopoldo Lopez and Henrique Capriles were both mayors of two of Caracas’ wealthiest municipalities during the 2002 coup — Chacao and Baruta, while Maria Corina Machado was a close ally of Pedro Carmona, the wealthy businessman who proclaimed himself dictator during Chavez’s brief ouster. Lopez and Machado signed the infamous “Carmona Decree” dissolving Venezuela’s democratic institutions, trashing the constitution. Both Capriles and Lopez were also responsible for persecuting and violently detaining members of Chavez’s government during the coup, including allowing some of them to be publicly beaten, such as Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, former Minister of Interior in 2002.

All three have been major recipients of US funding and political support for their endeavors to overthrow Chavez, and now Maduro.

The US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its offshoots, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) provided start-up funds for Machado’s NGO Sumate, and Capriles’ and Lopez’s right-wing party Primero Justicia. When Lopez split from Primero Justicia in 2010 to form his own party, Voluntad Popular, it was bankrolled by US dollars.

Over the 10-year period, from 2000-2010, US agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI), set up in Caracas in 2002, channeled more than $100 million dollars to opposition groups in Venezuela. The overall objective was regime change.

Indeed, USAID is quite active in Venezuela, much of its activity taking place through front groups like the Solidarity Center, a recipient of a number of USAID grants. The Solidarity Center, of course, is only one of the four main offices of the National Endowment for Democracy, a notorious agent of international destabilization. The Solidarity Center is also connected to the AFL-CIO, the largest American union currently in operation.

Golinger provided more details regarding the recent historical underpinnings used as justification for the demonstrations as well as those individuals seen as “leaders.” Summarizing the recent events that led up to the 2014 protests, she writes,

In January 2014, as Venezuelans arrived back from their Christmas vacations, economic difficulties continued. Maduro began cracking down on businesses violating newly enacted laws on price controls and speculation. Towards the end of January, new measures were announced regarding access to foreign exchange that many perceived as a devaluing of the national currency, the bolivar.

Sentiment built among opposition groups rejecting the new measures and calls for Maduro’s resignation increased. By February, small pockets of protests popped up around the country, mainly confined to middle and upper-class neighborhoods.

During the celebration of National Youth Day on February 12, while thousands marched peacefully to commemorate the historic achievements of youth in the nation’s independence, another group sought a different agenda. Opposition youth and “students” led an aggressive march calling for Maduro’s resignation that ended in a violent confrontation with authorities after the protesters destroyed building façades, including the Attorney General’s office, threw objects at police and national guard and used molotov cocktails to burn property and block transit. The clashes caused three deaths and multiple injuries.

The leader of the violent protest, Leopoldo Lopez, went into hiding following the confrontation and a warrant was issued for his arrest due to his role in the deadly events and his public calls to oust the president. Days later, after a lengthy show including videos from a “clandestine” location, Lopez convened another march and used the event to publicly turn himself over to authorities. He was taken into custody and held for questioning, all his rights guaranteed by the state.

Lopez became the rallying point for the violent protests, which have continued to date, causing several additional deaths, dozens of injuries and the destruction of public property. Relatively small, violent groups of protesters have blocked transit in wealthier zones of Caracas, causing traffic delays and terrorising residents. Several deaths have resulted because protesters refused to let ambulences through to take patients to the emergency room.

Gollinger’s assertions are most certainly merited, that the United States was behind much of the unrest and supported the so-called opposition in Venezuela both under Chavez and Maduro is without question. After all, what has been known for some time was recently revealed by a Wikileaks release of Hillary Clinton’s emails, showing that the U.S. Secretary of State actually led a team designed to delegitimize and hamper Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution. The emails revealed that Clinton via Madeleine Albright initiated Spain into the destabilization as an ally.

In addition, propaganda operations via outlets like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East broadcasting networks increased particularly against Venezuela. The State Department actively courted Latin American countries that were at odds with Venezuela and engaged in a massive spying operation via the National Security Administration. It’s noteworthy to mention that when the U.S. funded “opposition” in Venezuela won majority seats in the Parliament in 2016, Clinton responded, “we’re winning.”

With all this in mind, it is easy to see how three years of intense destabilization has led to the eventual triumph of opposition forces that are by definition a tentacle of a foreign country. While the attempt to oust Maduro has not been completed by a long shot, the majority enjoyed by the Western-backed opposition will play an important role in the months leading up to 2017 when the opposition is able to call for a referendum on Maduro himself. Without a doubt, the Venezuelan people have innumerable, legitimate complaints with the Venezuelan government. It is thus understandable why so many would be susceptible to foreign propaganda and destabilization campaigns.

Regardless, it is up to the Venezuelan people to decide whether or not they keep their president, oust him or do something else. These decisions should be made without U.S. propaganda outlets, U.S. funding and U.S. Intelligence Agencies manipulating situations and causing crises. It should also serve as a reminder to any nation that seeks to resist Anglo-American hegemony that it must not tolerate U.S. or Western NGOs that seek to destabilize their government and their society. These nations must immediately pass legislation that requires these NGOs to fully disclosethe nature of their funding on all written and verbally declared statements as well as their relationship with foreign interests. Others such as the NDI, IRI, OSI and elements of U.S. AID should be banned entirely. If these nations do not begin to recognize the threat and act accordingly, then not only are destabilizations in their future, but Monsanto will be setting up shop as soon as the dust settles.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies,Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 600 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

A small town in Palestinian West Bank, north of Jerusalem, Nabi Saleh, essentially the home-town of the Tamimi clan, has like all other Palestinian towns suffered under the occupation of Israeli military forces and settler villages. Ben Ehrenreich’s book “The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine” documents his many months in the town and in surrounding areas. The title derives from a spring, ‘Ein al Qoos (the Bow Spring), that was the main water supply for the farmers/herders of the village. The nearby settlers blocked access to the spring and subsequently, on Fridays, the people of the village accompanied by international witnesses marched in protest towards the spring, always to be met by Israeli military forces protecting the settlers access.

Within that, “The Way to the Spring” highlights the tactics and politics of subjugating the indigenous people of an area under military and settler occupation. It is a book that speaks at times poetically, at other times in the simple basic descriptions given by the villagers/Palestinians of the West Bank; that speaks also of the political scenarios – within an historical context – at the time of the author’s visits and the ramifications throughout the region; that speaks with empathy of the pain and suffering endured under occupation.

It is a hard book to read, not for language or context, but for the overall tenor of the stories rising from this encounter between militarized occupiers and the indigenous people. The anger, humiliation, anguish, and physical and emotional pain create a somber sad atmosphere from which little hope rises, leaving only existence and steadfastness: the knowledge that there is no where else to go and that conditions have deteriorated over the span of Israeli settlement building.

Apart from the expected tales of violence, torture, imprisonment, intimidation, and humiliation, there are other points that are strongly represented in the work.

Collaboration

Most directly is the Palestinians attitude towards their own ‘leaders’, the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas. In the summer of 2014, from where Abbas was ensconced in Saudi Arabia, “he defended the PA’s continuing security coordination with the Israeli military as “in our interest and for our protection.” In a demonstration against a security crackdown in Ramallah:

The crowds descended on the police station, attacking it with rocks and chunks of concrete, helling “Traitors!” and chanting “The PA is a whore!”

The Israelis were shooting from one direction and the PA from another, the two security forces acting in concert against the same opponent.”

Two messages were left in the wake of the riots, “First to the PA: you are ours and everyone knows it….And second to the Palestinian people…your leaders take their orders from us.”

Funding has never been cut to the PA. A U.S. official cited in Haaretz said,

Israeli security forces remained in constant cooperation with their Palestinian counterparts…It is against our interests – and Israel’s interests to cut ties with and funding to such a PA government.” There was probably no single policy so hated by his own people as the PA’s ongoing collaboration with the occupying army.

The war in Gaza that followed, not directly, but within the same violent continuum, demonstrated the state of hatred fostered by the Israeli government towards the Palestinians. It was fostered by the Israeli bureaucracy but “whatever force was pushing those bureaucratic processes forward was not rational at all. It was merely murderous, rooted in fear and a rage that flowed beneath the ground in hidden channels, secret and unmentionable conduits that had been there all along and were only now erupting.”

Media

Another point is emphasized within these stories, not by its presence, but by its absence. Western mainstream media is very good about highlighting Palestinian attacks against Israel as the work of a demented terrorist population. Seldom is heard anything about the ongoing daily/weekly/monthly criminal acts of the IDF occupation forces in the West Bank, actions that work against international law and what could be perceived as customary common law.

By labelling all Palestinians as terrorists, by classifying them all as ‘snakes’ or other vermin, this demonized other becomes a forgotten target of western settler atrocities, matching the processes of all colonial settler countries before hand. That daily oppression and humiliation is never reported in the mainstream media, perhaps because it reflects sadly back on our own government’s complicity with Israeli war crimes and, above all else, does not support geopolitical interests, foreign policy, nor domestic policies.

The economy

I have heard arguments about the Palestinian economy – at least in West Bank – and how well it is doing – at least in Ramallah. Ehrenreich presents a short dissertation on the wonders of economic construction in Ramallah, an area called Rawabi.  In association with other development projects in the West Bank, Ehrenreich’s research revealed that “with any major development in the West Bank, the same groups and individuals keep coming up, the same bewitching haze of associations among supposed enemies.” It is in essence the power of money that lifts a few of the elite cadre above the others, above where “distinctions could no longer be seen.”

Occupation

It remains that the military occupation and the settlements are the core of the stories and events within “The Way to the Spring.”  Taking land and pushing people away from their homes is the visible surface of the occupation,

but overall, with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair….The land mattered to everyone, but despite all the nationalist anthems and slogans, the harder fight was the struggle to simply stand and not be broken.

Operating behind a mainstream media curtain, over-shadowed by other events in the region, ignored by most westerners as they are entertained by another created spectacle or another game to distract their thoughts – willingly – from serious consideration of the significance of events in Israel or the greater Middle East, the occupation continues its slow painful destruction of Palestinian land, culture, and spirits of the Palestinians.

“The Way to the Spring” is a powerfully evocative work, one that needs to be front and centre in presentations to the citizens of the west, perhaps to disturb them as a simple historical recounting of events or misrepresented and contorted legal arguments might not.

You may have seen in today’s papers a revolution in banking is on its way with the smartphone taking centre stage.

One of the key reasons is to give control back to the customer, to stop banks trying to rip us off and flog us products we don’t need.  This is all very admirable and a step forward in protecting the consumer.

But, one of the solutions which the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) have come up with is to encourage us to entrust our banking to a mobile telephone.  This will, it is hoped, make us safer and protect us from mis-selling by restricting us from having a conversation face to face with a real person.

Big Brother Watch do not agree.  The mis-selling of products wasn’t down to face to face engagement being a fundamentally bad way of doing business, it was down to bosses encouraging bad practice.  Turning people towards using their mobile devices as a preference to talking through their bank accounts with a real person is not going to solve the problems inherent within the banking industry.

Encouraging people to use their mobile telephones and to bank via apps on their phone may improve convenience but it will not make people’s banking experience safer, if anything it will make it more insecure, vulnerable to misunderstanding and open to cyber problems.

First of all it appears the CMA has failed to acknowledge the problems of denial of service attacks our high street banks have already faced.  Customers of Natwest and RBS who were unable to access their bank accounts, make payments, had mortgage approvals denied, pay blocked or direct debits halted due to the “IT error” probably haven’t forgotten.

This kind of attack is an ongoing problem as is cybercrime and online fraud. Crime figures released last month show that online crime and fraud currently affects 1 in 10 of us.  It can be argued that a large part of the problem is the way in which we use our mobile devices.  Increasingly people do their banking on the move using unsecured and therefore vulnerable  public Wi-Fi connections, connections which are known to be exploited by hackers, identity thieves and other unscrupulous characters lurking completely unseen online.  These unsecured connections are used to target people banking, shopping and sharing their financial details via their phones. When we bank online we are required to go through a whole host of security processes, these do not exist in the same way in mobile app banking.

Even if the Wi-Fi connection is secure can we guarantee the security of our mobile telephone?  Yesterday it was announced that over 900 million Android phones were vulnerable to being hacked due to a bug.

These invisible and often unspotted threats are far greater than a bank manager being ordered to attempt to mis-sell you a product.

The creation of PPI repayment schemes has cost the banks dearly, but if the concerns we have outlined aren’t addressed, the pot of cash required to reimburse affected customers has the potential to be a whole lot more. That is if they don’t turn the blame onto the customers themselves for poor online and mobile security!

Online and mobile banking is not going away, and nor should it. Technology is here and it has an important role to play, but seeing it as the leading solution is a quick fix for absolutely no long term gain.  Solving the inherent problems requires a move towards treating customers like people, re-establishing honesty and transparency; encouraging secure and trustworthy relationships in which people can conduct their financial business safely, not shoving people into a world of faceless technology and calling it choice. Encouraging us to trust technology rather than people is not a solution and it is not going to make banking safer for any of us.

US stock indexes were mixed on Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index closing slightly lower and the Nasdaq Composite index rising marginally, following their record-breaking performance the day before when all three major indexes hit new all-time highs on the same day.

The banner day on Wall Street, the first record day for all three indexes since December 31, 1999, reflected the enthusiastic response of the financial parasites who dominate the US and world capitalist economy to the news that Macy’s, the biggest US department store chain, was closing 100 more stores and laying off thousands more employees.

Macy’s stock shot up by 17 percent, despite the firm’s report of declining revenues and slowing sales growth. Other major chains, including Kohl’s, JC Penney and Nordstrom, also recorded sharp stock rises despite similarly grim economic news, as investors anticipated more store closings by them as well.

Hundreds of retail stores have been shut over the past two years as the impact of relentless cuts in wages and pensions and the permanent destruction of decent-paying jobs, combined with sweeping cuts in social programs, have thrown tens of millions of working class families into poverty or near-poverty. The bankers and speculators have placed relentless pressure on the chains to cut costs and increase profit margins at the expense of their employees and the general public.

The surge in stock and bond prices both in the US and internationally, which has further enriched the capitalist elite, has come amid mounting indications of stagnation and slump in the real economy and a worsening social crisis. Economic growth in the US, Europe, Japan and China has slowed to a crawl. New figures released Friday pointed to a slowdown across the entire Chinese economy, with factory output, business investment and retail sales all failing to meet economists’ projections.

The euro zone economy grew by a paltry 0.3 percent in the second quarter, with Italy failing to register any growth and the German economy expanding at a reduced rate.

Gross domestic product in the US is barely increasing, rising only 0.8 percent in the first quarter and 1.2 percent in the second. Both labor productivity and business investment are falling sharply, reflecting the systematic diversion of resources from productive investment to financial speculation and parasitic activities such as stock buybacks, dividend increases and mergers and acquisitions.

US corporations, flush with cash extorted through the slashing of wages and benefits and the imposition of speedup, are hoarding $1.9 trillion. They refuse to invest in new plants and equipment that could provide decent jobs and address the decay of the country’s bridges, roads, schools and housing because the profit margins are too low, preferring instead to speculate on the market and buy back their own stock to increase the take of big investors and inflate the bonuses of top executives.

More negative news on the state of the US economy released Friday barely impacted the stock market. US retail sales for July were unchanged on the month, falling short of the 0.4 percent rise predicted by analysts. In addition, producer prices fell by 0.4 percent from June, the biggest monthly decrease in ten months, reflecting the mounting deflationary pressures in the US and globally.

The markets for the most part brushed off the new indices of slump, even welcoming them for decreasing the likelihood of an increase in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve or other major central banks. Ever since the Wall Street crash of 2008, triggered by the recklessness and outright criminality of the banks and hedge funds, the central banks in the US, Britain, Europe and Japan have been pumping trillions of virtually free money into the financial markets to rescue the financial aristocracy and increase its monopoly on income and wealth.

This has fueled the massive rise in stock and bond prices and the further shift in wealth from the bottom to the very top. Since hitting its lowest level of the year last February, the S&P 500 has gained 20 percent. According to the Wall Street Journal, the consensus among financial analysts is that the Dow will hit 20,000 within the next year.

But despite the talk of “recovery,” the policies of record low interest rates and “quantitative easing” have failed to effect a recovery in the real economy. Instead, the central banks and capitalist governments, led by the Obama administration in the US, have overseen a class war offensive to wipe out all of the previous social gains of the working class.

Large sections of the American people are living in “third world” conditions. The indices of social decay are shocking. Earlier this week, the journalObstetrics & Gynecology published a study showing that between 2000 and 2014, the maternal death rate in the US rose by 27 percent. The US is the only advanced country to record a rise in maternal deaths. Since 1987, the maternal mortality rate in the US has more than doubled.

This study follows reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.

These are not temporary regressions that will be reversed within the framework of the existing diseased social and economic system. Even leading financial officials are now acknowledging that the slump ushered in by the crash of 2008 shows no signs of lifting. In recent months, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen has spoken of slow economic growth as the “new normal,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Legarde has warned of the “new mediocre,” and former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has characterized the world economy as suffering from chronic and systemic “secular stagnation.”

What has been called the “financialization” of the US economy, which has come to characterize the world economy, is the outcome of a protracted process of decline and decay at the very center of global capitalism, the United States. From 1985 to the present, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen more than four-and-a-half times, from approximately 4,000 to over 18,500. Over this very period, there has been a dramatic decline in industrial and manufacturing jobs, a sharp slowdown in economic growth, and a steady decline in the wages and living standards of US workers. The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s.

This crisis, and the malignant social conditions it has brought, are barely referred to in the US presidential election campaign. Neither party or candidate can offer any policies to address the critical needs of working people and youth. That is because they are both totally controlled by the corporate-financial aristocracy and do its bidding. Their focus is on seeking to overcome growing popular opposition to austerity and war in order to prepare for a vast escalation of military violence abroad, including against nuclear-armed Russia and China, and a further assault on the democratic rights and social conditions of the working class at home.

This past week, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton delivered speeches on their economic policies in Detroit, the symbol of the social carnage created by decades of factory closures, wage cuts and austerity. They spoke within blocks of the ruins of shuttered auto plants and vacant fields where stable working class communities once stood. They said nothing about the bankruptcy of the city, which was used to impose a bankers’ dictatorship and destroy city workers’ pensions and health benefits. They had virtually nothing to say about the pervasive poverty in the city or the destruction of its public school system—which they both support.

Trump laid out a nakedly pro-corporate agenda, calling for massive cuts in income taxes for the wealthy, a more than 50 percent reduction in corporate taxes, the total elimination of the estate tax, and the removal of all remaining regulations on business. Clinton, in the guise of a “jobs” and “infrastructure” program, promoted yet another scheme to hand out tax cuts and other incentives for companies to hire workers at poverty-level wages, with the trade unions brought in to keep the workers in line in return for a cut in the spoils.

The two competed with one another in promoting economic nationalism and trade war policies to pit American workers against their class brothers and sisters in Mexico, China and elsewhere and promote patriotism and militarism.

There is no solution to social inequality, poverty and austerity outside of a united working class assault on the capitalist system itself. The financial parasites and their political stooges must be driven from power, their corporations and banks turned into publicly owned and democratically controlled institutions, and the wealth produced by the working class marshaled in a planned and rational way, not only in the US but internationally, to meet social need, not private greed.

A lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. claims that United States aid to Israel is illegal under a law passed in the 1970s that prohibits aid to nuclear powers that don’t sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). 

The lawsuit was filed by Grant Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy (IRMEP).

The lawsuit comes as the Obama administration is pushing to finalize a ten-year memorandum of understanding which will reportedly boost aid to Israel to $4 billion per year.

Such aid violates longstanding bans on foreign aid to non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) with nuclear weapons programs, the lawsuit alleges.

Senator Symington with JFK, who was adamantly against a nuclear Israel.

Since the bans went into effect, U.S. foreign aid to Israel is estimated to be $234 billion.

Smith says that during investigations into the illegal diversion of weapons-grade uranium from U.S. contractor NUMEC to Israel in the mid-1970s, Senators Stuart Symington and John Glenn amended the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to ban any aid to clandestine nuclear powers that were not NPT signatories.

Symington said at the time that “if you wish to take the dangerous and costly steps necessary to achieve a nuclear weapons option, you cannot expect the United States to help underwrite that effort indirectly or directly.”

Smith says that both the Symington and Glenn amendments have since been watered down and now apply only to nuclear transfers after 1985.

Smith says that the Obama administration follows precedents established since the Ford administration by ignoring internal agency and public domain information that should trigger Symington and Glenn cutoffs and waiver provisions governing foreign aid.

In 2012 the Department of Energy under U.S. State Department authority passed a secret gag law called “Guidance on Release of Information relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability.”

Smith says that measure promotes a “nuclear ambiguity” policy toward Israel.

The primary purpose of the gag law is to unlawfully subvert Symington and Glenn arms export controls, the lawsuit alleges.

In 2008, former President Jimmy Carter told reporters that Israel has “more than 150 nuclear weapons.”

In reporting President Carter’s remarks, the BBC also reported that “most experts estimate that Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in the 1990s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the country’s Dimona nuclear reactor.”

Smith says that the administration has three legal avenues to deal with a nuclear Israel under the Symington and Glenn amendments – either cut off foreign assistance, change the Symington and Glenn amendments to exempt Israel, or just grant a waiver.

Such Symington and Glenn waivers have already been granted to two other countries in a similar position – Pakistan and India, Smith said.

“But if you are Israel, and you don’t want an arms race in the Middle East, then you pretend it’s unknown that you have the weapons,” Smith said.

Comment: A little known aspect of Kennedy’s foreign policy was his insistence that Israel stop its nuclear program. In May 1963, he warned Ben Gurion that if Israel didn’t allow inspectors to Dimona, Israel would find itself completely isolated. The Israeli PM was not pleased and abruptly resigned. Six months later, Kennedy was assassinated. It would be a blessing to JFK’s memory of Symington’s work were to vindicate Kennedy’s position, and isolate the Israeli regime for their unacknowledged weapons of mass destruction. (Symington was JFK’s first choice to be his VP.)

As the Syrian Arab Army and Syrian government make more significant advances in restoring security to northern Syria’s Aleppo and its population, war-propagandizing human rights groups posing as neutral, and Western media (and Gulf counterparts like Al Jazeera) churn out recycled and debunked accusations anew. 

According to these compromised US government and Soros-funded NGOs and much of the corporate media, there is only one “last” pediatrician and a scarce number of doctors left in Aleppo. They are, of course, referring solely to the terrorist-occupied regions of Aleppo (eastern and some northern quarters) and even then ignore the reality that the Syrian government continues to pay the salaries of doctors in terrorist-occupied areas, including eastern Aleppo.

This “last-pediatrician”assertion was put forth earlier this year as part of a media frenzy attempting to vilify Syria and Russia as “targeting civilians” (when in fact targeting foreign-backed terrorists). Those media and human rights hyenas ignored the following realities about greater Aleppo:

• The presence of terrorists (Jabhat al-Nusra, and what the west calls “moderates” — Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Fateh, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, and factions of the so-called Free Syrian Army) in eastern and northern Aleppo.
• The presence of over 1.5 million civilians in the government-secured areas of western Aleppo, who are murdered and maimed daily by terrorist-fired, US/Turkish-made rockets, missiles, mortars and ammunition, as well as explosive bullets, and locally-produced explosive-stuffed gas canisters and mortars.
• The presence in government-secured Aleppo of civilians from terrorist-occupied areas of Aleppo — many of whom as early as 2012 fled the influx of terrorists to their districts, others who over the years since have fled west, and a small number of whom have recently been able to flee via humanitarian corridors to safety in western Aleppo.
• The presence of not just one, but over 4,100 doctors (source: Aleppo Medical Association) and numerous functioning hospitals in Aleppo — in spite of the criminal western sanctions on Syria and in spite of hospitals having been targeted by terrorists’ bombings.
• The fact that the terrorists in eastern Aleppo are predominantly non-Syrian (and certainly non-“rebels”), coming “from eighty-one different countries with significant contingents from Turkey, the Gulf Arab states, North Africa, and Russia’s Chechnya and North Caucasus region.” [source: 10 Facts About Aleppo]
• That at least 80% of the terrorists are affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the majority of the remaining otherwise hold the same distorted and ruthless ideologies. [source: 10 Facts About Aleppo]

Doctors In Aleppo Refute Media Lies

In the first week of July 2016 I traveled by car to Aleppo. When entering the southern Ramouseh district of the city, the car sped along a road known for terrorist snipers. Three weeks later in Ramouseh, a woman was sniped by a terrorist and killed.

In Aleppo, I met with doctors from the Aleppo Medical Association (established in 1959), including Dr. Zahar Buttal, Dr. Tony Sayegh, and Dr. Nabil Antaki.

One question I posed to the doctors was regarding the other oft-repeated lie of the “last pediatrician” in Aleppo, a startling allegation designed to shock western readers and rally them against the Syrian government. And one which has no basis in truth.

Dr. Zahar Buttal, Chairman of the Aleppo Medical Association, refuted such allegations, noting that Aleppo has 180 pediatricians still working in the city. Of one of the alleged lone pediatricians he said: “The media says the only pediatrician in Aleppo was killed in a hospital called Quds. In reality, it was a field hospital, not registered.” As for the pediatrician, “We checked the name of the doctor and didn’t find him registered in Aleppo Medical Association records.”

Indeed, the Quds hospital referenced was central to the April/May frenzy of media lies regarding Aleppo and the Syrian government, and Russian allies. Claims around the building called al-Quds hospital contradicted one another, the fallacies and serious discrepancies outlined in this article.

Also central to the lies were the bias and propaganda of the very partial, corporate-financed Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), which supports areas in Syria controlled by terrorists, specifically Jabhat al-Nusra (whose failed attempt at re-branding with a new name – Jabhat Fatha al-Sham – does not negate its ties to Al-Qaeda nor erase their crimes).

The next, related, question for the doctors was: If government-secured Aleppo has 180 pediatricians, how many doctors in total are still working there? Lying media have for months claimed the number of doctors are dwindling, including even a late July propaganda piece in The Intercept which asserted that “the number of doctors in Aleppo City has plummeted into the low dozens. The number of remaining medical specialists is even smaller.”

Yet, according to Dr. Zahar Buttal, until now there are 4,160 doctors registered and active in Aleppo city, in the government-secured areas of over 1.5 million people. Of the 4,160 doctors, 200 have been newly registered since the beginning of this year.

As for the media claims of a lack of specialists in Aleppo, in addition to the 180 mentioned pediatricians, there are of course many more specialists in Aleppo. According to the Aleppo Medical Association’s Dr. Zahar, specialists still practicing in the city include:

• 30 cardiovascular surgeons
• 214 general surgeons
• 112 orthopedists
• 11 pulmonologists
• 12 neurologists
• 8 neurosurgeons
• 250 obstetricians/gynecologists
• 15 gastroenterologists

Dr. Nabil Antaki, himself a gastroenterologist, is one of a group of 15 specialist doctors which, since late 2012, have volunteered their services, treating in private hospitals (with the most minimal equipment and medical fees possible) upwards of 500 civilians severely injured by terrorist bombings, needing specialist care and often life-support. Specialists in his group alone include: three general surgeons, one heart surgeon, one neurosurgeon, two orthopedic surgeons, and three anesthesiologists.

Dr. Antaki has been outspoken about the western media lies on Aleppo. When the western-created “Aleppo is Burning” campaign took flight in late April – the exact time when western-backed terrorists increased their daily bombing of Aleppo to severe bombardments – Dr. Antaki, seeing the worst of the casualties and bombings, spoke out.

When I met him in July 2016, Dr. Antaki continued to be vocal about the media manipulations and fragrant lies about the reality on the ground in Aleppo.

“All of the campaigns which were launched by the western media concerned the east part of Aleppo, which is the part controlled by the ‘rebels’. All the media reported that the people there are suffering, the buildings are destroyed and that the Syrian government are doing ‘war crimes’. But, what we are receiving in the part controlled by the Syrian government is much worse than in the east part. Nobody speaks about what is happening in the western part of Aleppo.There are not only tens of mortars every day which fell on the western part of Aleppo, but hundreds, and every day we have hundreds killed or wounded. And nobody spoke about it. When the media spoke about one supposed hospital destroyed in the eastern part, one week after, the main maternity hospital in Aleppo was hit by bombs sent by the ‘rebels’, and women were killed, and nobody spoke about this.”

Aleppo’s Dr. Tony Sayegh has also been vocal about the blatant media bias on Aleppo. In July, regarding the Quds hospital and related propaganda, Dr. Sayegh told me:

This hospital, in the Sukkari district, they made a big propaganda about it, ‘the last doctor in that area,’ which is absolutely wrong. The government has doctors working in that area who get their salaries from the government, even though the area is controlled by terrorists. For the government, all areas and and their inhabitants are Syrians. Areas where there are terrorists, like al-Manbij, like al-Bab, in all those areas there are many doctors working with the health ministry, and they take their salaries from the health ministry.

Aleppo’s Over Ten Thousand Dead and Maimed Absent From Corporate Headlines

Dr. Nabil Antaki gave the following overview of life for the civilians of government-secured Aleppo, from mid-2012 until our July meeting.

Since July 2012, the main area of Aleppo receives every day mortars, bombs and gas canisters, sent by the ‘rebels’ on the civilians living in Aleppo. Here you have human damage more than there, but less physical destruction, because here we are receiving mortars and gas canister bombs. If a mortar hits the building, it might make a hole the size of a window, but also kill five people at once. In the part of Aleppo under the government control, every day we have dozens of injured and killed.

In late April 2016, terrorists in the occupied eastern quarters of Aleppo, as well as then-occupied Beni Zaid and neighbouring districts, increased their normal bombing campaigns of mortars, gas canister explosives (from household to the the largest size canisters, stuffed with glass, bearings, metal shrapnel), explosive bullets, and powerful foreign-supplied rockets to from high-tens to over one hundred per day on the heavily-populated areas of Aleppo secured by the Syrian state.

Of the heightened bombardment, Dr. Nabil Antaki told me:

Usually you don’t have just one mortar, you have a rain of mortars: ten, twenty, thirty, and more in a few hours. Many people are wounded at the same time. When ambulances bring people to the public hospital, maybe twenty or thirty people arrive at the same time. The public hospitals lack enough medical staff and equipment. So if you have ten severely wounded persons arriving at the same time at the public hospital, by the time care comes, a victim has time to die.

In his Aleppo Medical Association office, Dr. Zaher Buttal read from his diary statistics on the late April/early May terrorists’ bombardment campaign:

• April 23^rd: 81 martyrs, 30 wounded.
• April 28^th & 29^th: Bloodiest days. 31 martyrs, 75 wounded **initial numbers only.
• From April 23^rd-30^th: 120 martyrs, over 800 wounded.
• May 3^rd: 25 martyrs, 100 wounded (including 3 women killed in the al-Dabeet maternity hospital explosion).

Although the Aleppo Medical Association documented the daily number of killed and injured by this increased bombing campaign, and although the areas attacked included a number of registered Aleppo hospitals, corporate media and Wall Street-backed “human rights groups” in their Turkish-based, or further-removed, reporting on Aleppo preferred to cite “unnamed activists” and al-Qaeda-in-Syria “White Helmets” actors.

Like many (if not most) Aleppo residents, Dr. Zaher Buttal has never heard of the White Helmets. The fact that the head of the Medical Association is not aware of this group purporting to be rescuing civilians in Aleppo highlights the reality that they work solely in terrorist-occupied areas and for the terrorists themselves. For more information on the terrorist-propaganda group that is known as the “White Helmets,” see this video and this article.

Other Pro-Terrorist Propaganda

The same July 2016 Intercept article which promoted the lone-doctor narrative also neglected to mention that a hospital they cite is in fact a hospital not only long-established but also belonging to a volunteer association headed by Syria’s Grand Mufti, Dr. Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun.

The Intercept article read: “Almouslem’s hospital, Omar Ibn Abdel Aziz, has long been the only functioning medical facility in its pocket of eastern Aleppo City.”

In a mid-July and then an August 11^th meeting with Mufti Hassoun in Damascus, he explained that the organization (The Association of Raising the Standard of Health and Social Status) of which he is Director had two hospitals and ten clinics daily giving medical care for free to up to 1500 of Aleppo’s poorest. One of these hospitals was the mentioned Omar Ibn Abdul Aziz hospital. It had three operating rooms, an MRI, nine dialysis machines, 12 incubators, and 50 beds. It is now controlled by terrorists who, Mufit Hassoun said, further mounted machine guns on the hospital’s three ambulances. The humanitarianism of western-backed so-called “moderate” “rebels”.

Mufti Hassoun explained:

In 1985 we started construction of the hospital, and in 1992 the hospital started operating. We treated for free over 400 patients daily, people from a very poor neighbourhood.

When the terrorists took over the hospital, they evicted the doctors, and killed three of the nurses and more than ten of the patients. The media say that MSF is supporting the hospital, but they are using it like a field hospital to treat terrorists. This is the hospital that we built with our own hands, and now they lie and say that it’s their own hospital.

Halfway through a video which the Intercept piece links to, who should appear but the war-propagandizing White Helmets – who only work in terrorist-occupied areas. This is the evidence the Intercept presents, along with a UN report lacking sources for its assertions. The UN has no physical presence in terrorist-occupied eastern Aleppo and, like lying media and NGOs, relies on “unnamed activists” and the SOHR-type sources for their statistics.

Brazenly, Al-Hel online media stole a photo from the Aleppo Medical Association, claiming it depicted doctors in terrorist-occupied eastern Aleppo: “Aleppo doctors are demanding an end to the bombing of the regime … and describe the situation as ‘a humanitarian catastrophe’.”

The equally war-propagandistic Facebook page, Syria Breaking, shared the stolen-photo and Al-Hel article, adding its own lies:

There are now in the eastern part of the city of ‪#‎Aleppo, no fewer than 300 thousand people, there are only 30 doctors in five hospitals to serve them.

The photo in question was in fact from a May 6^th protest (photos here) organized by the Aleppo Medical Association outside of the destroyed al-Dabeet maternity hospital, gutted on May 3^rd by a terrorist rocket. According to Dr. Zaher Buttal, more than 150 doctors attended the demonstration.

The protest came following the weeks of carnage from terrorists’ relentless bombardment of civilian areas all over government-secured Aleppo – including numerous hospitals – and was, Dr. Buttal said, both in anger at the terrorists’ targeting of hospitals in Aleppo and also to show the world that, contrary to media lies, Aleppo does have doctors.

Of the signs doctors held, Professor Tim Anderson wrote:

Their signs – in English, Italian and German as well as Arabic – read: ‘Syrian Arab Army represents me’, ‘Long live Syria, long live Aleppo’, ‘Terrorists are killing our children’, ‘Armed opposition is destroying our civilisation’, ‘No for armed opposition’.

From the terrorists’ May 3^rd bombings, a rocket landed on a parked car right next to the al-Dabeet maternity hospital, causing a massive explosion which gutted the hospital interior, severely damaged the exterior, and burned the two cars parked behind it. Footage from a nearby building’s security camera shows the rocket and subsequent massive explosion occurred at 9:36 am, May 3^rd.

While initial reports said 16 civilians were killed in the May 3^rd terrorist bombings, by the time the wounded had succumbed to their severe injuries, 25 people were killed and over 100 injured, according to the medical association’s Dr. Zaher Buttal. The three women killed were in the al-Dabeet hospital reception at the time, said Dr. Dabeet. One of the injured included a 28-week-pregnant woman who survived the loss of long sections of her intestine due to shrapnel injuries.

The operating room was destroyed, along with patient rooms, five of ten incubators (the other five needing repair), and much of his equipment.

One week later the maternity hospital was again hit by a terrorist-fired mortar, destroying the roof and injuring construction workers there, according to Dr. Dabeet.

According to Dr. Zaher Buttal, other hospitals hit include the Ibn Rashd hospital, with a mortar hitting the top floor, the Arab Medicine hospital, and the perimeter of the Razi hospital.

Starving, Besieged Civilians? Liberated Areas Ignored

While terrorists’ bombings and sniping attacks have been the most pressing issues in Aleppo in the past few months, other crises since 2012 have been those of water and electricity shortages, as well as the terrorist-blockades suffered by the population in government-secured Aleppo, cutting off food, fuel and medicine to the city.

The already risky Ramouseh road which I took into Aleppo in early July was recently assaulted by terrorist snipers and shelling, and has been closed to prevent civilian fatalities. This sole road leading into Aleppo closed, terrorist actions have again cut the lifeline for the over 1.5 million people inside. In July, Dr. Nabil Antaki explained how terrorists themselves closed the road many times in the past, and the dire effects of doing so.

Because the ‘rebels’ control the main roads around Aleppo, Aleppo has suffered blockades, sometimes for a few days and other times for many, many weeks. During those many weeks, nothing was able to enter Aleppo: no food, no vegetables, no fruits, no gas, no medical equipment, no drugs… the people of Aleppo suffered a lot.

The water supply has been cut by ‘rebels’, because the main water stations are in ‘rebel’ areas. Many times they cut the water for weeks or months. So for three years, we had to use the water of wells — we now have in Aleppo 300 wells which we had to use to provide water for the 1.5 million persons living in Aleppo under the Syrian state.

In addition, we don’t have power supply, because the electricity generator and power supply are in the ‘rebel’ portion of Aleppo, and they cut the supply. That’s why people have private subscription to 1 or 2 amperes, just to have 1 or 2 or 3 bulbs during the night. They have to pay very expensive prices just to have this. The people of Aleppo are truly suffering.

Mustapha Melhis of Aleppo’s water authority explained in July 2015:

Our water reservoirs are 90 kilometers [56 miles] away, in Hafsa, a region held by IS [Islamic State]. In May, they cut the amount of water [supplied] by half….

The second aspect of the problem is distribution. The water pumped by IS flows to the Suleiman Halabi and Bab al-Nairab stations here [in Aleppo]. Both areas are controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra, and they are using the water as a weapon to impose their demands.

In the same article, Aleppo Governor Mohammad Marwan Olabi said:

The power plants are outside the city. Terrorists control two areas from where electricity lines to Aleppo pass. Whenever they want to put pressure on Aleppo, they cut the electricity. And when electricity is gone, the water supply is cut off as well.

Corporate media have largely ignored these very real crises, and instead manufacture (regarding terrorist-held eastern Aleppo) the same types of propaganda campaigns of “starving civilians” which earlier flooded social media and were endorsed by dubious NGOs, like those on Madaya and Yarmouk. In all cases, no mention is made of the fact that the population in the area includes terrorist factions or why there is any lack of supplies (because of the terrorist factions).

As with Madaya and Yarmouk, when residents of the terrorist-inhabited regions do manage to speak to media, inevitablythey speak of terrorists stealing food supplies, hoarding goods and selling them at extortionist rates, and preventing residents from leaving to safer areas.

On July 28, the Syrian Arab Army fully secured the Bani Zaid and Lairamoun northern neighbourhoods of Aleppo city,liberating them from the western-backed mercenaries who occupied the districts since October 2012.

Civilians who had remained in Bani Zaid spoke of the terrorists’ firing of gas canister and other bombs on the civilians of neighbouring government-secured Aleppo districts. Western corporate media largely ignored this significant liberation and the jubilation of liberated residents.

On the same day, President al-Assad issued a decree granting amnesty to Syrians who laid down their weapons and reconciled with the state.

When the Syrian-Russian coordinated humanitarian corridors opened in eastern Aleppo in late July, reports soon after emerged of terrorists preventing residents from leaving, including assassinating residents who attempted to leave. When some residents from these areas did manage to evacuate, testimonies showed them thanking the government for providing the basics and cursing the terrorists for having stolen from them, abused residents, and in many cases killed their loved ones.

Russia Today interviewed evacuees who likewise did not praise the west’s so-called “rebels” but spoke of the hell civilians endured under terrorist occupation.

“We left with our remaining children. May God punish the rebels. They did not allow us to leave, they deprived us of gas, water, electricity and bread. We were not allowed to leave. There were no medicines. They used to tell us you live with us or die with us,” one woman said.

Attacks On Aleppo Continue, To Media Silence

“For three days after the liberation of Bani Zaid, it was very quiet in Aleppo. People were happy, there were no more mortars. Suddenly, yesterday, the terrorists started sending mortars and rockets on Aleppo again, especially on Hamdaniya where thousands of displaced people live. So people are leaving this neighbourhood to find another place,” Dr. Nabil Antaki told me on August 1^st .

In a phone call on August 10^th, Dr. Zaher Buttal updated that since July 30^th, terrorist bombings had killed 30 civilians in Aleppo, and wounded hundreds. By August 11^th , Dr. Buttal said another 16 civilians in Hamadaniya, Aleppo, had been killed by terrorists’ missiles, another 45 wounded.

Today there was supposed to be a truce between 10 am and 1 pm. Terrorists ignored this and again bombarded Hamadaniya neighbourhood.

Both Dr. Buttal and truth-based media have reported that terrorists used toxic gas in their bombardment of civilian areas of Aleppo.

The Western corporate media and NGO complex, on the other hand, continue to talk about imaginary “last doctors” in Aleppo, while ignoring the very real suffering of over 1.5 million Syrians in government-secured Aleppo, as well as the doctors who are treating them. This is hardly surprising given that, from the very beginning, the corporate media has toed the NATO agenda on Syria, which is to manufacture every imaginable lie and accusation against the Syrian government, the Syrian Arab Army, and the people themselves, in order to chase the NATO-GCC-Zionist-Turkish dream of imposing a puppet government in Syria. They have failed.

Eva Bartlett is a freelance journalist and rights activist with extensive experience in the Gaza Strip, where she lived a cumulative three years (from late 2008 to early 2013), arriving by boat as a part of the Free Gaza missions. She documented the 2008/9 and 2012 Israeli war crimes and attacks on Gaza while riding in ambulances and reporting from hospitals. Eva accompanied Palestinian fishers and farmers as they came under intensive fire from the Israeli army. She has been to Syria four times since April 2014 and works to convey the voices of a people suffering under the foreign war on Syria. Her writings can be found on her blog, In Gaza.

A scathing government task force report released on Thursday, shows that intelligence generated by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) was deliberately skewed.

Last year a senior analytst came forward noting that classified intelligence was being withheld. The whistleblower’s complaint is what led to the intitial investigation by the Defense Department inspector general.

However, in September of last year, the Free Thought Project reported on how more than 50 U.S. military intelligence analysts operating out of CENTCOM staged what was called a ‘revolt’ by intelligence professionals. The revolt came after announcing that their intelligence reports were being altered and manipulated to fit the public narrative that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS.

“The facts on the ground didn’t match what the intelligence was saying out of the United States Central Command,” said Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., a member of the task force.

The task force confirmed that both classified and public information was being manipulated by high-level officials.

As CBS News reports, the task force also found that CENTCOM’s public statements were far more positive than events on the ground warranted — such as in March 2015 when CENTCOM Commander Gen. Lloyd Austin testified to Congress.

“The fact is that he [ISIS] can no longer do what he did at the outset, which is to seize and hold new territory. He has assumed a defensive crouch in Iraq,” Gen. Austin said.

However, during those very statements, ISIS was preparing to overrun the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

According to the unclassified report, much of what was presented to the public was false:

Based on its own investigation, the Joint Task Force has substantiated that structural and management changes made at the CENTCOM Intelligence Directorate starting in mid-2014 resulted in the production and dissemination of intelligence products that were inconsistent with the judgments of many senior, career analysts at CENTCOM. These products were consistently more optimistic regarding the conduct of U.S. military action than that of the senior analysts. Based on specific case studies evaluated by the Joint Task Force, during the time period evaluated by the Joint Task Force, CENTCOM produced intelligence that was also significantly more optimistic than that of other parts of the Intelligence Community (IC) and typically more optimistic than actual events warranted. Additionally, many CENTCOM press releases, public statements, and congressional testimonies were also significantly more positive than actual events.

While the Obama administration is attempting to maintain that they knew nothing about this intelligence manipulation, the nature of this report and the high-level officials involved, implies otherwise.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official told The Daily Beast in September.

“There’s enormous evidence about how this information from talented career professionals inside the analytic arm at CENTCOM did their job and accurately depicted what was going on on the ground, but when it got to very senior levels, that information was changed,” Pompeo said.

Only months after Obama made his statements about ISIS being “JV,” he was forced to acknowledge that the terrorist group was overrunning parts of Iraq. Then, by the following August, he announced US-led coaltion airstrikes in the region to combat extremists. After that, 5,000 troops were deployed. All of this — just as Americans were being told everything is “A-Okay.”

When the government is caught outright lying to the public to manipulate their feelings toward war, this should should raise serious red flags. The citizens of the United States have already been duped when intelligence was skewed about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That little white lie convinced Americans to support an illegal war, which, in turn, led to a deadly quagmire in the Middle East that laid waste to over a million innocent lives.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit

GR Editor’s Note: There are reports to the effect that the letter below on Hillary Clinton’s health which is circulating on social media could be “fake”.  The following report from Inquisitr says the following 

The article below should be read with caution.

*        *        *

Hillary Clinton’s medical records have been leaked to the public and they are devastating.  According to her Doctor, Mrs. Clinton suffers from “Dementia, Seizures and Black-outs.”  In fact, the Doctor made note that Clinton’s conditions are “considerably worse” than in 2013.

According to the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, “Subcortical Vascular Dementia” is defined as follows:

Subcortical Vascular Dementia. Subcortical vascular dementia, also called Binswanger’s disease, is caused by widespread, microscopic areas of damage to the brain resulting from the thickening and narrowing (atherosclerosis) of arteries that supply blood to the subcortical areas of the brain.

The medical definition above makes clear that Hillary’s condition is also known as “Binswanger’s disease (BD).”  We checked with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and they offer the following information:

What is Binswanger’s Disease?

Binswanger’s disease (BD), also called subcortical vascular dementia, is a type of dementia caused by widespread, microscopic areas of damage to the deep layers of white matter in the brain. The damage is the result of the thickening and narrowing (atherosclerosis) of arteries that feed the subcortical areas of the brain. Atherosclerosis (commonly known as “hardening of the arteries”) is a systemic process that affects blood vessels throughout the body. It begins late in the fourth decade of life and increases in severity with age. As the arteries become more and more narrowed, the blood supplied by those arteries decreases and brain tissue dies. A characteristic pattern of BD-damaged brain tissue can be seen with modern brain imaging techniques such as CT scans or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The symptoms associated with BD are related to the disruption of subcortical neural circuits that control what neuroscientists call executive cognitive functioning: short-term memory, organization, mood, the regulation of attention, the ability to act or make decisions, and appropriate behavior. The most characteristic feature of BD is psychomotor slowness – an increase in the length of time it takes, for example, for the fingers to turn the thought of a letter into the shape of a letter on a piece of paper. Other symptoms include forgetfulness (but not as severe as the forgetfulness of Alzheimer’s disease), changes in speech, an unsteady gait, clumsiness or frequent falls, changes in personality or mood (most likely in the form of apathy, irritability, and depression), and urinary symptoms that aren’t caused by urological disease. Brain imaging, which reveals the characteristic brain lesions of BD, is essential for a positive diagnosis.

Is there any treatment?

There is no specific course of treatment for BD. Treatment is symptomatic. People with depression or anxiety may require antidepressant medications such as the serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) sertraline or citalopram. Atypical antipsychotic drugs, such as risperidone and olanzapine, can be useful in individuals with agitation and disruptive behavior. Recent drug trials with the drug memantine have shown improved cognition and stabilization of global functioning and behavior. The successful management of hypertension and diabetes can slow the progression of atherosclerosis, and subsequently slow the progress of BD. Because there is no cure, the besttreatment is preventive, early in the adult years, by controlling risk factors such as hypertension,diabetes, and smoking.

What is the prognosis?

BD is a progressive disease; there is no cure. Changes may be sudden or gradual and then progress in a stepwise manner. BD can often coexist with Alzheimer’s disease. Behaviors that slow the progression of high blood pressure, diabetes, and atherosclerosis — such as eating a healthy dietand keeping healthy wake/sleep schedules, exercising, and not smoking or drinking too much alcohol — can also slow the progression of BD.

What research is being done?

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) conducts research related to BD in its laboratories at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and also supports additional research through grants to major medical institutions across the country. Much of this research focuses on finding better ways to prevent, treat, and ultimately cure neurological disorders, such as BD.

Where does this Leave the Election?

No rational person could vote such a sickly individual into the most important political office in the world.  To do so would be utterly irresponsible; even outright reckless.

Look, it’s not Hillary’s fault that she’s sick.  She didn’t intend to get this way, but she is, in fact, this way.  It’s sad.  I do not wish these health problems on her or upon anyone.  But the fact is, these health problems flatly disqualify Mrs. Clinton from being President.  We cannot have a person with Dementia with her finger on the nuclear button.

teleSUR looks at a few of the anti-colonial and revolutionary movements Castro has inspired and supported throughout his life, and his ongoing legacy throughout the world.

1. Liberation of Southern Africa

While Angola won its independence from Portugal on Jan. 15, 1975, inner political conflicts escalated between the leftist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA, the National Liberation Front of Angola, FNLA, and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, UNITA.

According to declassified documents, the U.S. sought to gain hegemony through a CIA operation which resulted in US$30 million in funding and support for the FNLA and UNITA. Apartheid South Africa supported the CIA operation by carrying out invasions, incursions and sabotages against Marxist forces within Angola.

Cuban soldiers, veterans of Cuito Cuanavale | Photo: The Greanville Post

Under Fidel’s leadership, more than 25,000 troops and military advisers were deployed to Angola during the war and ultimately helped win the independence of the country.

In 1988, the MPLA, with Cuban support, finally defeated the South Africans at the village Cuito Cuanavale after a six month battle. This battle was so vital to South Africa that the apartheid government considered using nuclear weapons against the MPLA and their Cuban allies.

By defending the MPLA’s control over large parts of Angola and supporting neighboring Namibia’s independence, Cuba curbed the ambitions of white supremacist South Africa. And after the fighting, Cuba continued to assist Angola with teaching programs like “Yes, I can,” which has taught more than a million Angolans how to read and write, as well as provided medical and exchange programs.

2. Apartheid South Africa

While he was still alive, Nelson Mandela cited Cuban support for the war against C.I.A.-backed South Africa in Angola as a great anti-apartheid victory. According to the iconic South African leader, Castro’s Cuba helped destroy the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor and inspired the Black population of his own country.

Nelson Mandela with Fidel Castro in Matanzas, Cuba in 1991 | Photo: AFP

“We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious, imperialist-orchestrated campaign,” Mandela said when he visited Cuba in the early 1990s. “We, too, want to control our own destiny.”

It was for this reason that Cuba was the first country outside of the African continent that Mandela visited after his release from prison.

“Cubans came to our region as doctors, teachers, soldiers, agricultural experts, but never as colonizers. They have shared the same trenches with us in the struggle against colonialism, underdevelopment, and apartheid,” said the legendary South African leader.

When Mandela visited the U.S.in June of 1990, he was criticized for his support for Fidel by right-wing protesters from the Cuban-American community. He was told that if he supported communism he should go back to Africa. Mandela’s African National Congress party would never become communist, but his affection toward Fidel and the Cuban Revolution, “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people,” was unwavering.

Hundreds of Cubans have given their lives, literally, in a struggle that was, first and foremost, not theirs but ours. As Southern Africans we salute them. We vow never to forget this unparalleled example of selfless internationalism.

3. Salvador Allende’s Chile

During the 1970s, the left-wing Salvador Allende took power in Chile and began to transform the economic and social foundations of the country, nationalizing natural resources, building homes for the poor and improving access to health and education.

Fidel Castro visits Salvador Allende in Chile. | Photo: AFP

In 1971, Chile under Allende defied the United States and an Organization of American States protocol which prohibited states in the western hemisphere from having diplomatic relations with Cuba.

This resulted in Fidel taking a month long journey to Chile where he developed ties with Allende while also meeting workers, students, peasants and attending left-wing rallies.

Later in 1973, Fidel told Allende to beware of fascism in Chile, warning him against placing too much trust in the military.

Castro had advised Allende to arm the workers. “If every worker and every peasant had had a rifle like that in their hands, there would never have been a fascist coup,” he remembered later. “That is the great lesson to be learned for revolutionaries from events in Chile.”

It was around this time that Fidel famously gave Allende an AK-47, which he would reportedly use to defend the La Moneda presidential palace during the last moments of his life.

Fidel and Allende kept close correspondence up until 1973, when the latter was deposed in the infamous C.I.A.-backed coup led by Augusto Pinochet. The two wrote letters to each other on how to improve the political process in their respective countries. Fidel is known to have advised members of the Popular Union, Allende’s political party.

After the Sept. 11 coup that toppled Allende, Fidel delivered a speech in which he praised the left-wing leader for having “more dignity, more honor, more courage and more heroism than all the fascist military together.”

4. Sandinistas Against Imperialism

The success of the Cuban revolution in the 1960s sparked a surge in leftist social movements and guerrilla movements who fought against right-wing dictatorships and U.S. imperialism in Central America. Many of these groups were not only inspired by the Cuban example but received direct support from Fidel’s Cuba including groups in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Panama—and of course, Nicaragua.

Fidel Castro and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega are received by Spanish President Felipe Gonzalez in 1984
| Photo: EFE

Formed in the 1960s, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew Anastasio Somoza’s U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1979, instituting campaigns of mass literacy and health care and drastically improving gender and economic equality in the country. But as with so many other examples in Latin America, by the early 1980s the C.I.A. had begun funding right-wing death squads in the country, known as the Contras.

Fidel’s Cuba had begun assisting the Sandinistas in the late 1960s, training guerilla leaders. In the post-revolution period, this support increased to the spheres of education and health care. With U.S. involvement and right-wing violence increasing, Cuba also provided arms and logistical support to the Sandinistas in the fight against imperialism.

5. Bolivarian Revolution

Late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez helped bring Latin America into the 21st century. After becoming president in 1999, Chavez was key in the region’s so-called “Pink Tide,” delivering radical social policies that transformed millions of lives while opposing U.S. imperialism across the continent.

Fidel Castro and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez | Photo: EFE

The Bolivarian Revolution led by Chavez spread rapidly throughout Latin America, inspiring the world’s first Indigenous president in Evo Morales and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, among other progressive leaders. And crucially, Chavez once described Fidel as his “mentor.”

Today, Cuba and Venezuela have bilateral relations in virtually all industries and sectors, from energy management to cooperation in social programs in health, education and agriculture. One such program that perfectly illustrates the ideals of the Cuban—and now Bolivarian—revolution is Operation Milagro. Launched in 2004 by the governments of both countries, Operation Milagro has provided free medical treatment for people with vision impairment in both countries as well as 34 others across the Global South.

“This is such a powerful mission, which has become so widespread across the continent and beyond, including in Africa, that the goal set by Fidel and Chavez of 6 million patients is a goal that we are close to meeting,” said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro back in 2015.

In 2008, Maduro, then serving as foreign minister, echoed Chavez’s sentiments when he described the Cuban Revolution of 1959 as influencing “the path” for “real political, economic, social and cultural independence” in both the 20th and 21st centuries.

Maduro made the comments as he led a delegation in Cuba as part of the Cuba-Venezuela Political Consultation Body. “Our relation is a profound, longstanding, strategic fraternity by which we have become a single people, a single nation, as dreamed by the liberating fathers.”

Just as the Western media attempted to hide the true nature of violence unfolding in Libya and Syria during the opening phases of the so-called “Arab Spring,” it is now attempting to do likewise regarding the Southeast Asian country of Thailand.

Between August 11-12 and within a 24 hour period, several bombs detonated in four separate regions of Thailand including Trang, the resort city of Hua Hin, Phuket, and Surat Thani. Several deaths were reported and dozens were maimed as shrapnel tore through their bodies.

The Western media was quick to blame the violence on southern separatists – however – that low-intensity conflict over the course of several decades has never ventured into any of the areas recently struck. There also is a matter of no motive existing for such a drastic escalation.

What the Western media intentionally is omitting, however, or ambiguously referring to dozens of paragraphs down within their respective reports, is that the primary suspects are instead the US-backed opposition headed by ousted ex-Prime Minster Thaksin Shinawatra, his Pheu Thai political party (PTP), and his ultra-violent street front, the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), also known as “red shirts.”

They possess the means and the motive, and the targets and timing also all point to them.

The areas hit are all strongholds of anti-Shinawatra sentiment, including areas with leadership who helped oust his sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, from power in 2014. Hua Hin also serves as a second residence to the nation’s highly-revered king who also serves as head of state.

The timing coincided with Thailand’s Mothers’ Day, which is also a day Thais celebrate their royal institution. Shinawatra and his followers have spent years attempting to undermine and overthrow this institution, seeking to replace it with a political dynasty headed by Shinawatra’s family.

The attacks also take place just days after a democratic referendum overwhelmingly approved a new national charter that all but ended any prospects of Shinawatra returning to power.

Finally, there is also the matter of Shinawatra’s enthusiastic use of violence and terrorism as political tools, on a scale much wider than ever seen in the nation’s troubled southern region.

What the Western Media Won’t Report

Since coming to power, and a fact the Western media will not inform readers of, Shinawatra and his supporters have embraced violence and terrorism as political tools.

• 2003: Thaksin Shinawatra’s government would lead a “war on drugs” which left nearly 3,000 innocent people dead, most of whom had no connection with the drug trade and none of whom were served warrants, tried, or even so much as arrested – simply gunned down in the streets.

• 2004: Shinawatra’s government would brutally put down a protest in Thailand’s deep south, killing over 80 people in a single day.

• 2001-2005: According to Amnesty International, 18 human rights defenders were either assassinated or disappeared during Shinawatra’s first term in office.

• 2006: Shinawatra’s government began to face resistance from protesters in the streets demanding that he step down. It was during this period, Wikileaks would reveal, that the US Embassy itself connected multiple bombings to Shinawatra and his supporters. The US Embassy also included Shinawatra as a possible suspect in the 2006 New Year’s Eve bombings – a coordinated attack across Bangkok.

• 2009: Ousted from power and with several of his proxy governments also removed from office over a series of criminal convictions and court rulings, Shinawatra would put into the streets of Bangkok violent mobs led by his UDD “red shirts.” The protests quickly unraveled into looting and arson, leaving two innocent bystanders dead.

• 2010: Shinawatra would put mobs into the streets again, this time along with 300 heavily armed terrorists wielding M-16s (with M203 40mm grenade launchers), AK-47s, M-79 40mm grenade launchers, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), hand grenades, pistols, and sniper rifles.The fighting would leave nearly 100 dead, hundred injured, and ended with citywide arson carried out by Shinawatra’s supporters. During the violence, Shinawatra’s UDD leadership attempted to float the idea of armed “civil war” to their followers, hoping the escalate violence in Bangkok across the rest of the country.

• 2013-2014: In 2011, Shinawatra’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra would take office as PM. She quickly used her position to move forward an “amnesty bill” that would exonerate her brother – a convicted criminal living in self-exile to evade a 2 year prison sentence. The move triggered widespread, massive protests lasting from 2013 to 2014.Shinawatra would again deploy heavily armed militants wielding war weapons to pacify protesters with nearly nightly raids. Nearly 30 people would die, including women and children. The violence precipitated a coup. ousting Shinawatra’s sister from power who – already impeached by a court decision – had refused to leave office.It should be noted that during this period, Shinawatra’s supporters would carry out violence not only in Bangkok, but in provinces across the entire country – just as seen in the recent bombings.

• 2015: A bomb blast in August would kill 20 and maim scores more in downtown Bangkok. The militants were linked to a Turkish terrorist group tied to NATO, revealing the prospect that Shinawatra’s Western backers may have become directly involved in using violence against the Thai government to coerce it politically.

With this in mind, there is no doubt that Shinawatra and his supporters, along with his foreign sponsors, at the very least have proven to possess the capacity and willingness to commit such violence. With the motives aligned as well, that the Western media is omitting even mention of Shinawatra and his supporters as possible suspects indicates a concerted cover-up.

The West is Giving Thailand the Libya-Syria Treatment

A fully informed reader can see quite clearly now who is behind the violence, and that more violence is likely and precisely why. They can also see the only logical and justified steps the current government must now take to neutralize and eliminate this threat to the people of Thailand and from the Thai political landscape permanently.

That is precisely why, then, the Western media is not fully informing readers.

Just as the Western media did in Libya and Syria where terrorists were portrayed as “freedom fighters,” terrorism portrayed as “resistance,” and militants committing acts of violence  – when governments responded – as being “victims,” the media is now attempting to do in Thailand.

The feigned ambiguity of who is likely behind the bombings in Thailand is being propagated by Western editors who had witnessed – and attempted to cover-up – Shinawatra’s violence in 2013-2014, in 2010, in 2009, and even as far back as 2006.

As others have noted, even though the US Embassy admitted that Shinawatra was likely behind a string of bombings in 2006-2007, they still worked ceaselessly to get him and his political allies back into power.

The method of operation of the West in Libya and Syria – the arming and backing of terrorists, the use of “protests” as cover under which to escalate a crisis into spiraling violence, and the portrayal of mercenaries and terrorists dismembering a sovereign nation with foreign-backing as a “civil war” – now appears to be in the opening phases in Thailand.

With even the alternative media getting their information from the BBC, Reuters, AP, AFP, CNN, and Al Jazeera – this conspiracy is being given an unwarranted head start.

However, with Libya and Syria’s tragedies clearly focused in hindsight, it may be possible to negate this head start, and turn it instead into a defeat for this global campaign of geopolitical destabilization before it consumes Thailand next, and others thereafter.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

As the two month anniversary approaches of the Brexit vote in June, Britain is still no closer to actually exiting the European Union (EU). Article 50 is yet to be triggered, with the Prime Minister stating again recently that this will not happen until 2017 at the earliest. Demands for a second referendum by establishment puppets continue to rage, and the fear campaign by the mainstream media that the world will implode if Britain actually leaves the EU continues to nauseate.

Whether Britain does in fact trigger Article 50 and leave the EU remains to be seen, and even if the process is initiated, the negotiations will take years to complete (potentially lasting longer that the EU itself given its current instability). This article is not focused on the issue of whether Britain will actually leave the EU or not however, but on a movement that was invigorated by the Brexit vote: the quest for Scottish independence.

Scottish Indy Referendum 2.0?

Since the Brexit vote, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, has been agitating for a second Scottish independence referendum following the September, 2014 vote which saw the remain side (with the help of a BBC propaganda campaign I must add) win 55.3% to 44.7%, with a 84.6% turnout.

The justification for Sturgeon’s and the SNP’s call for a second referendum is based on the fact that despite 51.9% of people in the UK as a whole voting to leave the EU in June, 62% of Scots voted to remain in the EU (with a 67.2% turnout in Scotland). This of course led many leaders of the SNP to claim that Scotland is being taken out of the EU against the democratic wishes of the Scottish people. Although it is uncertain whether a second vote will take place in the immediate future, there is no question that the grassroots Scottish independence movement will remain strong into the future.

SNP: The Party of Contradictions

 The mainline Scottish independence movement is spearheaded by the SNP, a party which takes completely contradictory positions on numerous issues. The SNP is a party which tries to blend nationalism with regionalism and internationalism; which is apparently opposed to nuclear weapons yet it supports NATO membership; and which demands independence from Britain whilst still wanting to retain the British Queen as head of state.

But the largest oxymoron of the SNP has got to be is its fervent opposition to being ruled by London, yet its fervent support for being ruled by Brussels. This zealous support of the EU by the SNP is a major reason why so many of the Scottish people voted to remain in the EU, in order to support the party that is supposed to represent their interests. Considering the fact that the EU is an anti-democratic political entity controlled by technocrats and which was created by a clandestine elite in conjunction with theCIA however, how are the interests of the average Scottish person going to be represented in such a monstrosity?

Austerity = Death

The SNP consistently attempts to minimize what the EU – in coordination with the undemocratic IMF – has done to numerous European countries, most notably Greece. The crippling austerity that has been forced on the Greek people by the Troika has been utterly catastrophic, bringing devastation and misery to the country.

Unemployment and youth unemployment are staggeringly high in Greece and numerous other EU countries, with the amount of people who are homeless truly shocking. Since austerity started to be implemented in 2010, rates of depression and suicide in Greece have also skyrocketed. In 2012, a 77-year-old man named Dimitris Christoulas was one of the Greeks who could no longer stand the austerity measures implemented, with his suicide note reading:

The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.

The Swiss Model

Very few people in Scotland look to Switzerland as the model for an independent Scotland, a country which has the highest standard of living in Europe and is neither a member of the EU or NATO. Switzerland’s foreign policy is based on neutrality, and not getting involved in costly and pernicious imperial wars across the globe. The Swiss constitution also incorporates aspects of direct democracy, in the form of a constitutional mechanism which stipulates that if 100,000 citizens sign a petition, there needs to be a referendum on the matter.

 Independence Should Mean Independence

“The EU and NATO are evil institutions,” in the words of the former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. Why would an independent Scotland want to be part of completely failed political entity in the form of the EU, and a completely obsolete military entity in the form of NATO? Independence should actually mean independence, not just from the EU and NATO, but from the financial tyrants that have been pillaging the world for centuries.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

The Global Research News Hour will be presenting special broadcasts over the summer months. 

Affiliate radio stations are encouraged to air this content as appropriate. 

Past programs are also available for download and rebroadcast.

For the duration of the summer, the Global Research News Hour’s highlighting past shows. Broadcasters are welcome and encouraged to use the repeat broadcasts on this webpage. However, broadcasters are free to avail themselves of any of the shows on the Global Research News Hour webpage.

   U.S. Campaign 2016: Searching for Democracy in a Broken System

  Politics has been called a rigged game, with elites using money and organizational resources to pull the puppet strings of most candidates for high office. However, the entrance into the race for US president of candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump who both reject funding from Wall Street threatens to challenge that truism.

This episode of the  Global Research News Hour attempts to cut through the propaganda and jargon and assess what real options are out there for making substantive and humane political change. It originally aired March 18, 2016.

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 Russia, Ukraine, Syria and the Grand Chessboard

 Despite Russia’s relative military weakness compared to Obama’s America, Putin’s nation has so far avoided containment,  survived sanctions, and not gotten embroiled in a quagmire.

This episode of the  Global Research News Hour focuses on the challenges facing Russia from the West and how it is prevailing  over efforts to exclude the one time superpower from the geo-strategically significant terrain of the Middle East and  Central Asia. The show originally aired October 30, 2015.

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 Looming Economic Collapse Scenarios facing the United States: Lessons from the Soviet Collapse

On the Global Research News Hour this week, we spend the hour discussing the looming collapse scenarios facing the United States with Russian-American engineer Dmitry Orlov. Orlov believes and states that the former Soviet Union was set up to be resilient in the face of collapse. This, he believes is not the case in the US or Canada. This episode originally aired January 23, 2015.

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 “The Non-Profit Industrial Complex”, and the Co-opting of the NGO Environmental Movement

On the Earth Day edition of the Global Research News Hour, independent investigative journalist Cory Morningstar spoke  about fossil fuel divestment as a flawed climate strategy, the failure of climate activists to address imperialism, a  critical UN Advisory Group report which environmental groups conspired to keep buried from public view, and other  inconvenient truths plaguing the non-profit industrial complex. This episode also includes a brief clip from a 2016  Winnipeg talk by celebrated author, journalist, and 350.org Board member Naomi Klein. The show originally aired April  22, 2016.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Monday at 3pm ET.

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The Global Research News Hour will be presenting special broadcasts over the summer months. 

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The appointment of Tomomi Inada as Japan’s Defence Minister, and the lack of tough questioning of Inada from the domestic media, is yet another indicator of how far Japan is in its descent into authoritarian rule under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Inada is a longstanding rightwing extremist with a history of expressing nationalistic and militaristic views. She said in 2006 that the objective of schooling must be to raise “elites” who would sacrifice their lives for their country. Regarding the infamous Yasukuni shrine, where it is said that the souls of soldiers fallen in battle rest, Inada believes that Japanese must pray at the shrine to “vow they will be next” in dying for the nation. In 2011, she argued that Japan should develop nuclear weapons. Yet, these chilling statements were barely even reported on in the mainstream media upon Inada’s appointment, essentially giving her a free pass.

A muzzled press

Indeed, this situation is not new, as the Japanese press has been effectively muzzled. Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have spent years exerting overt pressure on the left of centre Japanese press to refrain from ‘biased’ coverage, i.e. any commentary that deviates from the government position. The LDP has summoned TV directors to their HQ to chew them out, and several prominent journalists critical of the Abe’s policies were replaced in a short span of time, in circumstances many view as suspicious. Before the 2014 elections, the LDP sent a threatening letter to media outlets demanding ‘impartial’ coverage, and in 2016, the Minister response for broadcast regulation stated in parliament that licenses could be revoked if programming was not ‘politically neutral’.

The message is clear: tow the line, or else. International experts have sounded alarm bells: Japan has been in free-fall in the 2016 World Press Freedom Index published every year by Reporters without Borders, plummeting from a respectable 11^th place in 2011 to 72^nd place in 2016. In April, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression stated in April that ‘a significant number of journalists …  [felt] intense pressure from the government, abetted by management, to conform their reporting to official policy preferences’.

Abe’s efforts at silencing the press bore fruit during the recent Upper House election, in July. Even by the normally docile standards of the Japanese press, commentary was neutered in the extreme. Normally left of centre newspapers bent over backwards to present ‘both sides’. Political debate programs were notably fewer than in previous elections, and what little commentary there was was shunted to the end of news programmes. One could even have been forgiven for forgetting there was an election campaign in train. Meanwhile, right of centre media outlets have become Abe cheerleaders, trumpeting the duboius triumphs of so-called ‘Abenomics’, and the alleged security threat posed by China. In this situation, it is little wonder that the LDP emerged victorious in July.

Abe’s efforts at stifling freedom of expression do not end with the media: state schools, where teacher unions have traditionally been left leaning, have also been targeted. It is commonplace now for teachers who refuse to stand or sing the national anthem to be subject to formal discipline, and thought police in some schools even check that teachers are actually singing the lyrics (as opposed to just mouthing them). The LDP recently posted a web based form on its site asking for concrete reports on ‘biased’ teachers who ‘attempt to propagate a particular ideology in class’ (the example in the narrative was of a teacher who expressed opposition to the war bills). Though the government denies this, plans reportedly even exist to grade primary students on their patriotism.

Constitutional reform and militarism abroad

It is no secret that Abe longs to change Japan’s pacifist Constitution – and the recent elections give him the required 2/3 of the seats in both houses to initiate a referendum on Constitutional reform. Abe did his utmost to present the recent election as a referendum on his economic policies, avoiding the controversial topic of Constitutional reform. Nevertheless, Abe announced immediately after the election that he will initiate the debate at the next parliament, to start this autumn.

The longstanding desire of both Abe and the LDP to do away with the pacifist Article 9, which “forever renounce[s] war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes”, has been reported on both domestically and internationally. However, in many ways, Abe has managed to weaken Article 9 to the extent that it is almost irrelevant. In the summer of 2015, Abe ignored large scale protests throughout the country and bulldozed through parliament legislation that allows the government unprecedented freedom to engage in military interventions abroad – hitherto almost unthinkable in pacifist postwar Japan. The government made no secret that the legislation would enable Japanese military to participate in US interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere, without the adoption of special legislation as has been required. Coupled with legislation strengthening government secrecy – also rammed through parliament over cries of protests and expressions of international concern – Abe could now potentially send the military abroad without giving parliament any serious explanation.

Abe has also discarded the long standing government prohibition on arms exports. With no public consultation to speak of, Japan has become the world’s latest merchant of death. Abe has personally been extremely proactive in promoting Japanese arms sales as an engine for growth (though this has as of yet been met with limited success). It recently came to light that the government had agreed with the Government of Israel on joint development of drone weapon technology, assuring Japan’s participation in the oppression of the Palestinian people. Indeed, commentators close to Abe have heaped praise on Israel, calling it a model of advanced democracy and swooning over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ‘masculinity’.

Setting the stage for domestic oppression

In reality, Abe’s fixation on Constitutional reform is not confined to Article 9. As history has shown (in Japan and elsewhere), military escapades abroad come with tools for internal oppression, to stifle dissent – and it is such tools that the LDP has in mind. The LDP’s draft revised Constitution (which, since its publication in 2012, has received almost no attention in the mainstream Japanese media) is a model for despots and dictators everywhere. The LDP’s draft Constitution is not aimed at proscribing the limits of government prerogative: rather, it is the people whose rights would be restricted, while authorities enjoy unfettered power.

Clear and unambiguous language prohibiting torture in the current Constitution would be trashed under the LDP’s revisions – a clearly worrying sign, given the ongoing reports of systematic torture of criminal suspects at the hands of the Japanese police. Indeed, all of the extensive human rights safeguards in the current Constitution are essentially done away with, under a blanket restriction that the people “must understand that freedom and rights are accompanied by responsibilities and obligations” and that the exercise of rights ‘must never oppose the public interest or public order’. Promotional material published by the LDP says that “’Public order’ means the ‘social order’, and refers to a peaceful social life. It is obvious that individuals claiming their rights should not cause inconveniences for the social life of others.” The vague notion of a “peaceful social life” is particularly worrying, as senior LDP politicians have called peaceful demonstrations against government policy “a form of terrorism”. Indeed, Abe has suggested that he might start with proposing Articles to allow the government to declare a state of emergency, which could allow rights to be restricted practically at will.

Other LDP material, published in a manga format, dismisses the current Constitution as “individualistic”, arguing that “just because you have fundamental human rights doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want … if everybody acted selfishly, society would fall apart.” LDP material also lies about Japan’s legal obligations under international human rights law, suggesting that international law allows for the kind of sweeping restrictions in the LDP draft.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, none of this should come as a surprise. Though rarely reported on domestically, Abe (and most of the politicians he has appointed to successive cabinets) has well documented ties with the Nippon Kaigi, a shadowy group of right wing extremists that advocate for a return to the glory of empire and the doing away with “Western” values (e.g. individual rights and gender equality). The reigning Emperor, a committed pacifist by all accounts, visibly had shivers up his spine at an event in April 2013 when Abe and other conservative politicians greeted him with loud cries of ‘tennou heika banzai’ (long live the Emperor), the fascist war cry of the 1930s (an incident also mainly ignored by the mainstream Japanese media). The signs are ominous indeed.

Left of centre commentators whisper that Japan is heading towards the full blown fascism of the 1930s. What may be more likely is a form of authoritarian government (ala Turkey or Russia), where oppression becomes the norm behind the façade of democratic institutions, such as sham elections and a subservient press. Either way, in the absence of a fundamental change of direction, the future of Japanese democracy looks bleak.

Saul Takahashi is a human rights lawyer and activist based in Tokyo. He has worked for Amnesty International in Tokyo and in London, and also for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Palestine.

In the piece published on August 13, 2016, “Svobodnaya Pressa” (The Free Press), a leading Russian Internet news outlet, appeals to the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation to initiate criminal proceedings against Michael Joseph Morell (born September 4, 1958 in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, U.S.), former acting deputy director of the CIA, due to the presence of signs of the act, provided for in Paragraphs 4 and 5, Article 33 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (incitement to commit a crime and complicity in the commission of a crime), and in Article 361 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (act of international terrorism).

In the TV interview with Charlie Rose aired Monday, August 8, 2016, Michael Joseph Morell called for killing Russian military personnel serving in the Syrian Arab Republic.

Reliable, verifiable medical records from presidential candidates – what’s so hard about that?

In May 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama released a summary letter of his general health signed by Dr. David Scheiner, who had been Obama’s primary care physician for 21 years. Providing limited detail, the doctor found Obama to be in “excellent health” and “in overall good physical and mental health needed to maintain the resiliency required in the Office of the President.” The Obama campaign indicated at the time that it was not planning to release any further medical records, and it didn’t.

As president, Obama has periodically released health summaries publicly. The most recent report available on the White House website, appears to be from June 12, 2014, in which Dr. Ronny Jackson, physician to the president, provides two pages of detail and concludes: “The President’s overall health is excellent. All clinical data indicates that the President is currently healthy and that he will remain so for the duration of his Presidency.”

This is not a high standard of disclosure for a candidate or a president to meet, assuming that a candidate or a president is in good health. This relatively low standard is also hard, if not impossible, to enforce. John McCain, a cancer survivor in 2008, chose to give selected reporters just a three-hour opportunity to look at some of his health records, but his health did not become a significant issue in the campaign. On his campaign website, McCain posted a health summary more detailed than Obama’s. Hillary Clinton in 2008 apparently did not make any health records public (she has released tax returns for the years 2007-2014, with 2015 promised to be forthcoming).

2016 Candidates vary in providing detailed medical records

Green Party candidate Jill Stein is a doctor married to a doctor, and they have two sons who are doctors. She has not released her medical records this year, nor did she when she ran for president in 2012. She has publicly posted the first two pages of her 2015 tax return filed jointly with her husband, Dr. Richard Rohrer.

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, president and CEO of a medical marijuana company, appears not to have released any medical records. Of all the presidential candidates, Johnson has had perhaps the most serious physical mishap:

On October 12, 2005, Johnson was involved in a near-fatal paragliding accident when his wing caught in a tree and he fell approximately 50 feet to the ground. Johnson suffered multiple bone fractures, including a burst fracture to his twelfth thoracic vertebra, a broken rib, and a broken knee; this accident left him 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) shorter. He used medicinal marijuana for pain control from 2005 to 2008.

Former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders released a letter from his doctor in January 2016 summarizing his “general health history and current medical evaluation.” The letter said that the Senator takes daily levothyroxine to maintain thyroid function and intermittent indomethacin, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication to relieve pain. Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the Attending Physician for the Congress of the United States, concluded: “You are in overall very good health and active in your professional work, and recreational lifestyle without limitation.”

Before Republican candidate Donald Trump released any medical report, he promised that “it will be perfection.” He also wrote on twitter: “I consider my health, stamina and strength one of my greatest assets. The world has watched me for many years and can so testify – great genes!” On December 4, 2015, Trump’s doctor of 36 years issued a brief, four-paragraph letter, the highlight of which was that Trump had lost 15 pounds in the past year. Dr. Harold N. Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, concluded: “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

The Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, released her own medical records letter months ahead of the others. A two-page letter dated July 28, 2015, noted that Clinton had “a deep vein thrombosis in 1998 and in 2009, an elbow fracture in 2009 and a concussion in 2012.” (Deep vein thrombosis involves the formation of blood clots, usually in the legs, and is not life-threatening with timely treatment.) Dr. Lisa Bardack of the Mount Kisco Medical Group (near Chappaqua, New York) has been Clinton’s personal physician since 2001. She described Clinton’s recovery from the noted conditions, adding that as a precaution against further blood clots, Clinton takes an anticoagulant daily. Dr. Bardack concluded: “In summary, Mrs. Clinton is a healthy female with hypothyroidism and seasonal allergies, on long-term anticoagulation…. She is in excellent physical condition and fit to serve as President of the United States.”

Drudge dredges old news and Fox News gets sweaty

A year after Clinton’s doctor specifically addressed Clinton’s already well-publicized falls, the Drudge Report reprised the incidents as if there were something new to them. Drudge was pushing the same Hillary health narrative back in February when it failed to get traction. That was after he pushed the same theory in October, based on Clinton’s coughing during the Benghazi hearings. All the same, The Hill of August 8 passed on the re-recycled Drudge story, while noting that a “new” picture of Clinton, apparently needing help up the stairs, was taken in February. Elements of the Drudge story reprise have gone viral, and are still going viral, despite detailed debunking by sites like Mediaite.com and wonderfully extreme rants from Wonkette.com.

There’s another internet meme that, if true, would be more troubling. In this case there’s a purported leak of medical reports written by the same Dr. Bardack who wrote Clinton’s July 2015 health letter. These reports first appeared on a twitter account that was apparently taken down by its owner soon after the post. The documents have a superficial credibility, but may be fake – Snopes.com analyzes the question and calls it “unproven.” And that is a problem, because the questions are serious and need to be answered despite the political lynch mob rushing to judgment.

The diagnoses listed in these reports are “Complex Partial Seizures, Subcortical Vascular Dementia.” “Dementia” is a scary word. Clinton’s opponents are running with it, while the Clinton campaign has yet to respond more effectively than to call the attacks “shameful,” without further elaboration.

Curiously, the Dr. Bardack “dementia” documents are both dated well before her July 2015 letter affirming Clinton’s “excellent physical condition.” The authenticity of the July letter is undisputed. The earliest Dr. Bardack “report” dated February 5, 2015, discusses complications continuing from Clinton’s December 2012 concussion – blacking out, twitching, memory loss “have become worse over the last few months.” The letter refers to a diagnosis of early-onset Subcortical Dementia in mid-2013. The plan included increasing anti-seizure medication and ordering another MRI (brain scan).

The second Dr. Bardack “report” dated March 20, 2015, repeats much of the first, noting that: “Patient is being treated with both an anticoagulant and anti-seizure medications…. Patient is starting to become more depressed about her medical condition and the way it’s affecting her life…. We elected to raise the dosage on her antidepressants and anxiety medications. She advised me of her future plans and I advised her to travel with a medical team.” Strikingly omitted from the second report was any mention of an MRI or its results.

Three weeks later, on April 12, 2015, Hillary Clinton announced that she was running for President.

Does the “dementia” meme have legs? And whose legs might it have?

Sean Hannity and other Fox News folks are running one-sidedly with the Hillary Health meme. One of the frequent Fox “experts” is Dr. Marc Siegel, who was chasing the Hillary health question back in April before it was a meme in the twittersphere (@ HilsMedRecords). Fox News seems prepared to pursue this as long as it can, with Hannity hammering away and Martin Shkreli making an on-air diagnosis of Clinton’s “Parkinson’s Disease.”

But there’s another question lying in wait for the honest inquisitor and it goes something like this: so if Clinton has dementia and sounds cogent all the time, what’s up with Donald Trump who always sounds demented?

Salon was making that case back in April, quoting Trumperies like this Q&A sample from a meeting with the Washington Post editorial board:

QUESTION: This is about ISIS. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against ISIS?

TRUMP: I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good-looking group of people here. Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?

The writer, Sophia McClennen, went on to wonder:

As we scratch our heads and wonder how someone who says and does such things can still be a frontrunner, I want to throw out a concern. What if Trump isn’t “crazy” but is actually not well instead? To put it differently: what if his campaign isn’t a sign of a savvy politician channeling Tea Party political rhetoric and reality TV sound bites? What if it’s an example of someone who doesn’t have full command of his faculties?… At times it can be very hard to distinguish between extreme right-wing politics and symptoms of dementia.

McClennen goes on to analyze Trump’s behavior as potentially early Alzheimer’s, which his father had for six years before he died. She suggests that Trump should take appropriate tests to demonstrate his mental fitness. And talking about all the ways comics have made fun of the way Trump speaks, she says: “It’s not funny if he really has lost the ability to speak like a healthy adult.”

Salon on August 10 had another McClennen piece again shredding the idea of Trump’s mental competence. One of her points is that when Trump announced his health letter, he got the name of his doctor wrong (naming the doctor’s father). The son is a gastroenterologist, whose website has since been taken down.

The Constitution (Article II, Section 1) requires only that a president be a natural born citizen, at least 35 years old, and a resident for at least 14 years. There is no challenge to Clinton or Trump on a constitutional basis. The Constitution is silent on a presidential candidate’s mental or physical health. Once in office, a president’s failing health is not an impeachable offense. The 25th Amendment (Section 3) allows the president to step aside upon “written declaration that he [sic] is unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the presidency. The vice president then becomes the acting president until the president self-declares in writing the ability to resume the office. The 25th Amendment (Section 4) also provides for the removal of a president who is unaware of an inability to perform, whenever “the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or such other body as Congress may by law provide” declare in writing the president’s inability and submit it to Congress. In the event that the president disputes the inability, Congress decides.

Everything about Section 4 looks like an opportunity for serious, perhaps long-lasting chaos. We need to know now how healthy Clinton and Trump actually are. Dr. Bardack could help by saying whether the reports with her name on them are genuine. Both candidates could help by taking such medical tests and making such disclosures as are needed to answer fundamental questions about their competence now and in the future (insofar as that’s knowable). That’s what a rational electorate would expect, that’s what responsible political parties would insist on, and that’s what honorable candidates would provide.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

No one more dauntlessly represents redoubtable resistance against US imperialism – humanity’s greatest scourge.

On Saturday, August 13, Fidel Castro began his 10th decade. Remarkable by any standard, along with serious illness at nearly age 80. 

In his book “Fidel Castro: My Life,” he asked “(a)re we supposed to get down on our knees and have diplomatic discussions?”  

“Those who don’t respond, those who don’t fight, those who don’t combat, those people are lost from the beginning, and in us, you’ll never find that kind of person.” 

Cubans celebrated Fidel’s 90th. In Havana at midnight, a band played “Happy Birthday.” A fireworks display accompanied floats, dancers and salsa bands, stretching for miles down the coastal Malecon roadway.

One celebrant spoke for others, saying “Fidel is the best thing that happened to our country.” In retirement from official duties, he retains the title “Historic Leader.”

Not expected to appear for Saturday festivities in his honor, he’ll meet with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Ahead of his arrival in Havana, Venezuelan Vice President Aristobulo Isturiz said “(w)e are experiencing a time of threats, attempts at re-colonization, in which the people of the continent must have their morals and a strong spirit of resistance at the ready, for which we must look to the example of Fidel.”

He survived 12 US presidents, all wanting him eliminated – including Obama. His “new course on Cuba” is old wine in new bottles.

His so-called thaw in bilateral relations conceals dirty business as usual by other means – the end goal the same as earlier, US dominance replacing sovereign Cuban independence.

Tributes to Fidel poured in from scores of countries. Millions worldwide honor him. He’s the UN’s only acknowledged “World Hero of Solidarity.”

Cuban tobacconist Jose Castelar and his team spent days rolling a 90-meter cigar in his honor, saying it’s “to commemorate 90 years of our comandante…He hasn’t smoked for years, but the gift we are offering him is the hard work that we have done to commemorate his birthday.”

Biographer Ignacio Ramonet called him “the last ‘sacred giant’ of international politics. He belongs to the generation of mythical insurgents.”

They include “Mandela, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Carlos Marighela, Camilo Torres, Mehdi ben Barka (among others) who pursuing an ideal of justice, threw themselves into political action.”

“Like thousands of progressives and intellectuals around the world, among them the most brilliant of men and women, that generation honestly thought that Communism promised a bright and shining future, and that injustice, racism and poverty could be wiped off the face of the face of the earth in a matter of decades.”

Fidel represents redoubtable resistance against imperial repression, exploitation and ruthlessness – today’s America its principal exponent.

A new generation of Fidelistas continue his half-century-long struggle. He “refused to relinquish (Cuban) sovereignty to the greatest superpower on the planet,” said Ramonet.

On Saturday, August 13, Cuba will become “one giant concert,” reported the Havana Times. At age 90, Fidel remains committed to world peace and social justice.

His honesty and integrity are impeccable, his forthrightness expressed in concern about possible nuclear annihilation – America “bereft of…moral values” the leading threat.

Legendary in his own time, one day he’ll be immortalized more than already.

May he have many more birthdays in good health and vibrant spirit. Viva Fidel! 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].  

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” 

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html 

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.  

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Assassinations to reach an objective is not new for the all-powerful. The practice has been going on at least for centuries, if not for millennia, but it has intensified drastically in the last fifty years, and it is becoming ever bolder, as the rulers of the Anglosphere tighten their grip on humanity – on Mother Earth and her resources. .

They see their end may be nearing. People have increasingly access to alternative sources of news and information, and ever more people gradually start seeing the Big Lie of the controlled media, the propaganda that confuses their minds – and serves the 0.001%.

So – these obscure self-nominated “Masters of the Universe”, controllers of the western monetary system, are racing towards the New World Order, knowing that if they don’t hasten, they may not reach it. Their impunity has become increasingly daring. Their pressure is on chief-puppet Obama, whose pressure is on NATO and his European and Mid-Eastern vassals, and the pressure they exert on the world is by devastating wars, death, chaos, destruction of entire countries, economies, people – robbing of their resources – making them destitute, homeless and sick, many of them into refugees, fleeing their homelands – and where do they go? – To their own executioners, to the countries of the European Union (sic), to the very spineless nations that helped destroy their livelihood, where they are not welcome, to say the least. But do they have a choice? – Nope. It’s the closest place for them, where food and water and shelter, indispensable for sheer survival, may be available.

Assassinations come in handy, when there is a serious roadblock to the advancement of the self-elected rulers of the world – the elusive potentates, who are not just happy with dominating the Anglosphere, the world it must be. These few individuals or families have control over an all-overarching corporate finance kingdom, led by the military-security complex and world banking, spearheaded by the FED-BIS-Wall Street, intimately supported by the IMF and the very “World Bank” itself.

Does the Sudden Death of 38-Year young Shawn Lucas (right) come as a surprise? – On 28 June 2016, on behalf of supporters of democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and donors and members of the Democratic Party, Shawn Lucas filed a lawsuit against the DNC and its Chairwomen, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in an unprecedented nationwide class action for fraud. The charges included corruption, breach of fiduciary duties, voters’ fraud and manipulation with the aim of sidelining Bernie Sanders and assuring Hillary Clinton’s election at the Democratic National Convention. The DNC succeeded not only in electing Hillary as the official Democratic candidate, but also in soliciting and obtaining Sanders’ support for Hillary.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, said that he has damning evidence of Hillary’s fraud with the Clinton Foundation, as well as on the actions by the DNC to illegally exclude Bernie Sanders from his candidacy as a Democratic Party nominee. Shawn Lucas’ lawsuit may have contained critical evidence that could have put an end to Hillary’s candidacy. Could that have been the beginning of the end of the military security industry’s bonanza, as well as for the golden age of Wall Street, both of whom are counting very much on Hillary’s presidency to continue their ravaging onslaught on the world – with bombs and bank. Killing the messenger has been an old tactic of dictators to frighten other ‘potential messengers’ from misbehaving.

A DNC data analyst, Seth Rich, who worked on voting rights issues, was murdered on a Washington DC street, last month. It raises theories and speculations – did he know something that ought not to be known? – His killing remains unsolved as of this day.

Killings, assassinations and outright wars, carried out by Washington through secret services, military and NATO, within the US and around the globe, abound. Remember, the US Government and its massive machine of aggression are mere puppets for the small and all powerful elusive elite, those that have become so sure of themselves and of soon attaining their goal of One / New World Order, they are now displaying in public and without scruples their – hitherto kept secret – satanic ceremonies of all-controlling power. Murders of those in the way of reaching their objective are mere bylines.

A case in point is the recent (June 2016) inauguration of the world’s longest tunnel (57 km) at the Saint Gotthard mountain in Switzerland, where those behind the eye on top of the pyramid on the dollar bill, displayed openly a satanic show, of the likes that has not been seen in public for as long as history remembers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVms0oKezg0 .

A parade of blatant freemasonry at its worst. What before were carried out as occult gory ceremonies are now in the open. They don’t care. Is this a message that they have soon achieved their goal of full spectrum dominance; or is it a warning of more atrocities to come, as things are not running as smoothly anymore as they were in the past hundreds of years? – How could the Swiss Government support this ceremony? Or was it coopted into it?

After all the WEF (World Economic Forum), a freemason smoke screen, as are the Bilderbergers, the Trilaterals, the CFR, Chatham House and more – almost always takes place in Davos, Switzerland.

Likewise located in Switzerland (Basel) is the highly secretive BIS (Bank for International Settlements), also called the central bank of central banks, all-privately owned, Rothschild dominated, created in 1931, in the midst of the Grand Depression, presumably to regulate German reparation payments after WWI – the BIS, through which all international transactions have to transit and which served the FED-Wall Street to channel funds to the Deutsche Reichsbank during WWII to finance Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. – A legitimate question would be: Who runs Switzerland?

Death of Argentina Prosecutor

Also comes to mind the Sudden Death on 18 January 2015, by gunshot in the head, of Argentine prosecutor, Alberto Nisman. He was in charge of investigating the bombing of a Jewish Community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 that left 85 people dead. He had allegedly evidence against Cristina Kirchner for an alleged cover-up on behalf of Iranians who were suspected in the bombing. In fact, Iran was accused by the CIA for the bombing, but a motive was never given. It just was convenient at that time – as it would be today – to hit an unaligned country with a fabricated accusation. More likely was the AMIA (Spanish acronym for Argentine Israelite Mutual Association)bombing a false flag carried out by Mossad to ensure that Argentina would stick to Washington’s imposed blockage of potential energy trade relations between Argentina and Iran. This case will probably never be solved. But it is possible that Alberto Nisman had the answers in his report – which was not supposed to see the light of the day; and that the killing of Alberto Nisman was NOT instigated by Cristina Kirchner’s people, as the western media were propagating.

Fals Flags

Then, there are the thousands if not ten thousands of victims of false flag attacks, since the Big One, 9/11, that set the horrendous and endless war on terror in motion. They take place all over the world, by so-called Jihadists, who for sure have nothing to do with Islam, but are coerced or forced into killing innocent people by western secret services, mostly the odd trio- CIA-Mossad-MI6 – mere peons for the cause – to accelerate the power elite’s objectives. The ‘aggressors’ are almost invariably killed on location by the police. Dead men don’t talk.

The Anglo-American owned media make sure fear is spread widely and thoroughly so as to prompt people at large to literally and voluntarily give up their human and civil rights, asking for militarization of their countries – for their protection. What more do these pathetic beings (I can’t call them humans) on top of the pyramid want? – Full submission? What for? Hundreds of trillions if not thousands of trillions of our fake western fiat money they have hidden away, outside of the world’s fiscal authorities’ eyes.

But here comes the crux and our chance. They need to fully dominate the world, with this fraudulent worthless thin-air dollar-money, control Russia and China – hence the aggressions by NATO on Russia throughout Europe, and by the US Navy fleet in the South China Sea. They are the monster’s last serious vestiges. They are also the hope, the only hope, for the unaligned nations throughout the world, those who do not want to submit to the clutch of the global elites.

Salvation comes by leaving the dollar-euro based monetary system and join the new system under preparation by Russia and China, to which are also linked the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and eventually the BRICS. They comprise half the world’s population and about one third of its economic output (GDP). This alternative system is almost ready to be rolled out. The presstitute doesn’t write about the CIPS – the Chinese International Payment System- that is ready to circumvent the all controlling dollar-based SWIFT and the BIS. The rulers of power know it. It will be their demise. I have said this many times before and say it again: Defeating the western dollar-based monetary system by abandoning it for a viable alternative offered by the East, may be THE non-violent way of escaping the merciless oppression by the West.

China and Russia have gold-backed currencies. The West has money made of thin air. The Rothschilds and Rockefellers of this world also have huge amounts of gold, in fact, tons of gold reserved in the vaults of the BIS – quantities kept in highest secret – but it’s nowhere near enough to cover the thousands of trillions of thin-air dollars floating the globe. We may be approaching the end game. Let’s stay above ground where the light is and knowingly and with an awakened consciousness escape the satanic underground world of the ultra-powerful few.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media, TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. 

Washington’s foreign policy hot shots are flexing their rhetorical, warmongering muscles to impress Hillary Clinton, including ex-CIA acting director Morell who calls for killing Russians and Iranians, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

(Please read Part I, Part II, Part III,  Part IV  , and Part V before this article)

Thailand is the most crucial country in mainland ASEAN’s current geopolitical framework, bringing together the infrastructural interests of China, India, and Japan, and also being a sizzling political battleground between the US and China. It has a strong and stable economy (the largest in ASEAN behind Indonesia), and its centrally positioned population of nearly 70 million people outnumbers those in neighboring Laos, Cambodia, and the eastern region of Myanmar. With centuries of rich history behind it, Thailand is also one of the region’s civilizational leaders, but unlike contemporary Laos and Cambodia, it actually has the means with which to project its soft power and promote its political interests abroad. Ironically, however, just as much as the idea of civilization is a potentially unifying element for Thai society, it could also lead to its ultimate unravelling if this three-pronged concept is undermined in any significant way. Should naturally occurring, provoked, and/or manufactured factors negatively impact on the monarchy, military, and/or the idea of Central Thai-led “Thaification”, then Thailand could easily slide into a period of internal pandemonium that might reverse its leading regional status, subvert some or all of its planned transnational integrational projects, and might even lead to its partial territorial disintegration.

The geopolitical significance of Thailand cannot be overstated. The country’s dual maritime and mainland identities allow it to exert influence in either direction, and by tangential extent, so too can its premier allies. For decades, the US had used Thailand as a springboard for promoting its unipolar interests deeper into the heart of mainland ASEAN, but with Prime Minister Prayun Chan-o-cha’s decisive pivot towards China, Beijing can now reversely utilize its strategic advances in the country in order to acquire unrestricted access to the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, China isn’t the only country that has identified Thailand’s geopolitical potential, since both India and Japan are partnering with it in order to construct their own transnational connective infrastructure projects, the ASEAN Highway and the East-West Corridor, respectively. In the case of the latter two, their combined projects create the possibility of linking both of the Indochinese Peninsula’s coasts, which would of course complicate China’s multilateral economic diplomacy with the subregion via the ASEAN Silk Road. Finally, Thailand is a distinct civilizational center in mainland Southeast Asia that has previously been a force of strength and stability, and the undermining of its unifying identity of Thaification and its structural support mechanisms of the military and monarchy, no matter in which manner this may be, could create a burst of chaotic energy that collapses Thailand’s multipolar bridgehead potential and converts it into a geopolitical sinkhole.

The book’s research on Thailand begins by commencing a speedy overview of the country’s history, regretfully glossing over some of the finer elements of its past in favor of offering a concise synopsis most pertinent to the topic at hand. The work then identifies Thailand’s leading historical themes and explains their relevancy to the present. The final part of the study elaborates on the three interlaced Hybrid War threats afflicting Thailand and games out various scenarios for how they could unfold.

Building “The Land Of Smiles”

Regional Engagement And Territorial Retreat:

The modern-day territory of Thailand has historically played a very influential role in regional affairs, either as an important component of other empires (the Khmer Empire, Lan Xang, and the Burmese Toungoo and Konbaung Dynasties) or a center of power in its own right (the Rattanakosin Kingdom). Whether it was on the receiving or promoting end of regional influence, its centrally positioned location made it indispensable in facilitating engagement between the various powers and peoples of mainland Southeast Asia, and this geopolitical constant has remained in force up until the present. Furthermore, Thailand’s role was heightened by the “mandala” model of political relations that prevailed prior to the region’s colonial period, which saw civilizational cores radiating their influence and authority, sometimes even with geographically overlapping results with neighboring rivals. The interests of Burma (as scholars casually refer to what is now known as Myanmar during that time), Lan Xang, and the Khmer Empire thus intersected over contemporary Thai territory and the “mandala” of Ayutthaya (located north of Bangkok), stimulating a unique centuries-long civilizational engagement between these diverse actors and underlining the hub role that Thailand has traditionally fulfilled.

Ayutthaya Kingdom

To begin describing some general points of Thai history, the modern-day state’s progenerator was the Ayutthaya Kingdomthat existed from 1351-1767, and just like the Rattanakosin Kingdom that would later succeed it in 1782 after a brief regency transition to the Thonburi Kingdom, it had its fair share of territorial ebbs and flows. Its full history is quite detailed, but as a cursory summary, it promoted its interests eastward at the expense of the Khmer Empire but was later ransacked and destroyed by the invading Burmese Toungoo and Konbaung Dynasties from the west. All told, there were 20 different wars between Siam and Burma throughout the 16^th to 19^th centuries, representing a staggeringly high incidence of conflict between these two neighbors. While the historical memory of this rivalry still partially remains in each country’s contemporary psyche, it’s obviously no longer as influential of a force as it once was, although it could possibly be revived by either side for domestic political purposes and/or provoked from abroad to achieve certain geostrategic ends.

The Rattanakosin Dynasty that rose from the ashes of the Ayutthaya and Thonburi Kingdoms succeeded in halting the Burmese blitzkrieg and generally stabilizing its western frontier. This allowed it to more forcefully expand eastwards and incorporate the lands of the weakened Lan Xang into its empire and begin making concentrated moves against the Khmer. By the early 1800s, however, Vietnam had completed its incorporation of the southern Champa Kingdom and the Khmers’ holdings along the Mekong Delta via its Nam tiến (“southern advance”), thus placing it into direct rivalry with Siam for control over the rest of Cambodia. The two expansionist states of Siam and Vietnam inevitably ended up clashing over the Cambodian lands that were caught between them, bringing the two to war in 1831-1834 and 1841-1845. France began its imperial occupation of Indochina shortly thereafter through the 1858 invasion of Cochinchina (the area around contemporary Vietnam’s Mekong Delta) and its 1863 “protectorate” over Cambodia, the latter of which pushed back against Siam’s interests and put the French military directly along its southeastern border.

French imperial expansionism had its next major spurt during the 1893 Franco-Siamese War when Paris was successfully able to wrest control over most of Laos. Right around this time the UK also took the initiative in bringing the remaining Shan States in then-Burma under its control, thus cutting off what had earlier been Siam’s northern border with China. The French finalized their imperial frontier with Siam from 1904-1907, and right afterwards the British pressured Bangkok into acceding to the 1909 Anglo-Siamese Treaty that surrendered the latter’s control over some of its southern Malay-populated territories.  The combined French and British moves from the past half century were interpreted as a massive humiliation for Siam, albeit ones that were seen as strategically necessary in order to retain the Kingdom’s formal independence. Both imperial powers envisioned Siam functioning as a neutral geopolitical buffer between them, and for the most part, it played this role quite well. However, the territorial losses that multiethnic Siam suffered during this time in what are now modern-day Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Malaysia would play into the nationalist hands of World War II leader Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram (Phibun) and inspire the country that he had renamed “Thailand” to side with fascist Japan.

Thaification, Phibun, And World War II:

Siam experienced a swift military coup in 1933 that degraded the absolute power of the monarchy and led to quasi-democratic advancements. This event is notable because it was the first of many forthcoming significant times that the military would intervene in domestic political affairs, as has since regularly happened in the decades afterwards. In the years following the coup, the state began to accentuate its majority-Thai ethnic identity, particularly focusing on the Central Thais as the cultural core of this movement. At the time, a multitude of ethnic minorities still resided within Siam’s borders, although they weren’t as numerous or geographically concentrated as they previously were when the country controlled Laos and Cambodia, for example. Nonetheless, in the prevailing nationalist zeitgeist that was sweeping the world in the 1930s, Siam felt compelled to exercise its own version of these ideals, and the legacy of this initiative has continued into the present. It’ll later be described how the Laotian-affiliated Thai nationals of Northeastern Thailand (“Isan”) are ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and historically distinct from their Central Thai counterparts, but at this moment of time, it’s enough for the reader to understand that there were strong enough ethno-regional disparities in Siam to somewhat warrant the authorities’ belief that an identity-unifying program was necessary.

Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, known as Phibun, in 1955

The concept of Central Thai nationalism was enthusiastically promulgated by Field Marshal Phibun after he ascended to power in 1938 and became the country’s Prime Minister and Commander of the Siamese Army. One year later, vehemently believing in the idea of Thaification, he renamed the country to “Thailand” (understood as meaning “land of the ethnic Thais”) and issued 12 socio-cultural decrees that have been referred to as the “Cultural Mandates”. They dealt mostly with nationalism (i.e. renaming the country) and various behavioral actions (e.g. banning female toplessness, implementing a national dress code, suggesting optimal meal times and recreational activities, etc.), but what’s most relevant to the current study is how some of them sought to erode ethno-regional divisions, thus indicating that this form of identity was not only embedded into the minds of certain peripheral inhabitants (northern Hill Tribes, northeastern Lao, eastern Khmer, southern Malays, and western Karen), but that it was visible enough to pose what Phibun had by then considered a threat to national unity. Of pertinence, Mandate One includes a statement stipulating that “The people and nationality are to be called ‘Thai’”; Mandate Three says that citizens should “cease referring to Thai people inconsistently with the name of the nationality, or according to the preference of the group” and “use the name ‘Thai’ to refer to all Thai people, without subdividing them”; and Mandate Nine was specific wording that “Thai people must not consider place of birth, residence, or regional accent as a marker of division”.

Phibun’s nationalist ambitions extended beyond Thailand’s borders and into the territories that his country had humiliatingly been forced to cede to the French and British during the late-Siamese period. The territorial expansionism of fascist Japan was therefore attractive to the Thai leader, and he moved to ally his country with the rising imperial power in the hopes that it would aid and abet his own international designs in the region. The two states signed the Treaty between Thailand and Japan Concerning the Continuance of Friendly Relations and the Mutual Respect of Each Other’s Territorial Integrity in June 1940, and by the end of the year, an emboldened Thailand launched a war against France’s Indochinese possessions in Laos and Cambodia. The resultant Franco-Thai War ended with a Japanese-mediated peace in May that granted Bangkok control over some of the Laotian and Cambodian territories that it had earlier lost to Paris. Later that year, however, Japan ended up invading Thailand on 8 December, 1941, in order to secure transit rights for its planned attack on British-controlled Burma. That same day, Tokyo also attacked Pearl Harbor, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Phibun quickly capitulated and soon thereafter formalized his alliance with Japan, which later ended up leading to his country receiving certain territorial “rewards”. Specifically, Thailand reversed the losses that it had suffered in then-Burma’s Shan States east of the Salween River and the Malay-dominated provinces that it had formerly administered before 1909. After the end of the war, however, Thailand was forced to relinquish its control over these areas once more, thus solidifying the present-day borders of mainland Southeast Asia.

The War On Indochina:

After World War II, the US was insistent that Thailand not be punished for its actions and should only have to return the territory that it earlier occupied due to Japan’s diplomatic and military assistance. The French and the British were adamantly against such a lenient approach, but the US clearly enforced its will over its weakened allies in getting them to acquiesce to the slight ‘slap on the wrist’ that it envisioned. Washington’s strategy was simple but very successful – it knew that if it could co-opt Thailand by offering it a post-war ‘olive branch’, that it could then become the country’s implicit ‘protector’ in guaranteeing its sovereignty and security amidst the two vengeful empires that it was between and thereby establish its influence over the crucial mainland Southeast Asian state. The US had earlier granted independence to the Philippines but still commanded predominant influence over its affairs, but it needed a mainland component to complement its insular foothold in the region and diversify its geopolitical holdings, ergo the reasons for reaching out to Thailand.

Soon enough, the seeds of this policy ripened into geopolitical fruit when the US began involving itself in the War on Indochina, using its network of air force bases in Thailand to conduct bombing raids all throughout the region. Thailand was also facing a mild communist insurgency in its northeastern region, so its leaders felt the need to side even more closely with the US in order to receive its full support (which Washington happily provided in return for the basing rights). The country was undeniably at the forefront of the US’ War on Indochina and continued to occupy a chief anti-communist position even after the formal American withdrawal from the subregion in 1975 and Thailand in 1976.

Rouge guerrilla soldiers drive through a street in Phnom Penh, April 1975.

Thailand played host to insurgent Khmer Rouge units that were fighting against the Vietnamese units stationed in their country after the 1978-1979 war, coincidentally evoking shades of the conflict that both of them had over their neighboring in the 1830s and 1840s. The Vietnamese launched border raidsagainst the US– and Thai-supported Khmer rebel forces, and Thailand and Laos entered into a brief border war from 1987-1988. Bangkok’s position during this period was greatly increased through its neutralization of the northeastern communist insurgency in the early 1980s, which allowed it to secure its territory and more assuredly destabilize its Laotian and Cambodian neighbors without fear of consequential internal reprisals. All in all, it can be accurately surmised that Thailand consistently remained the US’ most stalwart ally in mainland Southeast Asia throughout the entire Cold War, proving that Washington’s post-World War II policy of punitive leniency was successful in achieving its tacit objective of strategically acquiring a forward operating position in the region.

The Student Factor:

One of the most important domestic political developments during the Cold War era was the rise of student advocacy groups during the 1970s. These were the vanguard of popular anti-military movements that wanted to return the country to civilian rule, although quite a few of the students envisioned that the future government should espouse socialist-like characteristics. A series ofstudent-organized mass demonstrations took place in October 1973 that eventually led to the military stepping down from power, but the brief period of civilian rule was cut short after the October 1976 student massacre that placed a different group of generals into power. What’s critical to point out in both of these monumental historical events is that the students played a key role in triggering the regime changes that ended up taking place, whether they were the kind that they anticipated (such as in 1973) or not (like in 1976).

The precedent of nationally significant student political activist movements is a socio-cultural factor that cannot be erased from the Thai psyche owing to the impact that the two regime change events in the 1970s had on the country. It can be said that student-driven movements have been somewhat of a tradition in Thailand ever since, a national ideal that is cherished yet controlled. Nowadays this type of anti-establishment resistance is once more returning to the forefront as Thaksin Shinawatra and his proxies seek new and creative methods to weaken the multipolar-oriented military government and return themselves to power.

The student movements of 1973 and 1976 didn’t have the Color Revolution works of Gene Sharp to guide them, but in the early 21^st century, their modern counterparts could predictably employ such measures as a means of maximizing their regime change efficiency, which in either case could evoke strong historical emotions among regular Thais. For example, some sympathetic segments of society would naturally view such a movement as following in the footsteps of 1973, while others might be fearful that it could end in a violent way like in 1976. If the military actually does crackdown just as it did 40 years ago, then this time it would likely receive intense Western criticism and might even be dubbed ‘the new Myanmar’, possibly with a similar sanctions regime imposed against it just like the ones that were enacted against its neighbor. If the US takes the lead in trying to “isolate” Thailand as a result of this, then it would only succeed in drawing the government closer into China’s arms, just like it did with Myanmar after 1989.

Economic Boom And Bust:

Thailand’s economy began to surge in the mid-1980s and exhibited the world’s fastest growth from 1985-1994, averaging 8.2% per year over that that period. The lightning-fast development that took place catapulted Thailand into Newly Industrialized Country status and placed it on the global investment map. However, such rapid growth also had its detriments, since it resulted in financial and sectoral bubbles that would inevitably be popped. Be that as it was, there was no guarantee that Thailand’s economy absolutely had to tank, as is what ended up happening as a result of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.

To remind the reader about what was written at the very beginning of the book’s ASEAN research, that regional economic crisis was spurred by George Soros’ speculative and vulture-like practices, which when combined with Thailand’s existing structural deficiencies and bubble vulnerabilities, created an economic storm of catastrophic proportions. It should also be reminded at this time that the incident also served the dual goal of testing the degree to which a manufactured economic crisis can trigger regional anti-sovereignty processes, be it regime change like what later happened in Indonesia or capitulation to the IMF like Thailand ended up doing.

Thaksin’s Thailand:

The economic difficulties of the immediate post-crisis years gave birth to the socio-political conditions that would be necessary for Thaksin Shinawatra’s political career to take off. The multimillionaire businessman had a knack for populism and in presenting himself as a non-establishment figure, which garnered him exceptional support among the rural citizens of the country, especially those in the northeastern region of Isan. Aided by handouts and generous subsidies, his policy of “Thaksinomics” endeared him to a wide subsector of the previously apolitical masses, getting many of them involved in the political process for their first time and thereby irreversibly widening the country’s electorate.

While he was busy generating his groundswell of support among the rural poor, Thaksin was also engaged in a lot of self-enriching corruption (which he was later found guilty of in 2008), but he hoped that his close ties to the US establishment would be enough to help him weather through any domestic crisis. In order to endear himself closer to Washington, he contributed troops to the War on Iraq in 2003 and was ‘rewarded’ later that year by having his country designated as a “major non-NATO ally”, thus allowing it to purchase a different caliber of American military equipment that it had earlier not been able to. The announcement also symbolized the close nature of strategic ties between the two decades-long ‘partners’, which essentially has always been that of a patron-client relationship. Ingratiating himself even closer to Washington, Thaksin unilaterally pushed for a free trade agreement between Thailand and the US without consulting the country’s legislature, an arrogant political move that eventually contributed to his 2006 ouster. Prior to his overthrow, he intensified military operations against the Muslim Malay separatist movement in southern Thailandthat had recently been rejuvenated, some members of which had begun to resort to terrorist attacks and affiliate with Al Qaeda. The legacy of this dual-sided escalation has been that 150,000 troopswere deployed in the region as recently as 2014, and the Hybrid War vulnerabilities that this conflict entails will be discussed later on in the work.

Thaksin Shinawatra

Thaksin’s direct dominance over the Thai political scene would soon come crashing down in 2006 after the military staged another coup. The political situation in the country had become markedly polarized in the year beforehand, with Thaksin’s corruption having become a galvanizing force for the nascent opposition. His political opponents boycotted the 2005 electionsthat he held three years before schedule, and they were marred by widespread accusations of fraud. Thaksin wanted to centralize his power while he still had the support of the rural masses, predicting that his popular appeal might falter after the introduction of the US free trade agreement that he planned to implement (but was never able to successfully conclude). The country was thrown into political turmoil right after the vote was held, and the crisis continued until September 2006 when the military acted to restore order. Thaksin was abroad at the time in New York City and was charged with corruption, which he was found guilty of two years later, and his political party was dissolved. A new one was promptly formed in its place, and it capitalized off of the social capital their leader had cultivated during his premiership to win the 2007 elections, which in turn set off a new round of political turmoil in the country.

Thailand became divided between pro-Thaksin “Red Shirts” and anti-Thaksin “Yellow Shirts”, and street violence began to regularly break out between each competing camp. The Prime Minister was changed a few times within a couple year period until the 2011 election brought Thaksin’s younger sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, to power. She was commonly perceived as being a political stand-in for her brother, and while this earned her the full support of the Red Shirts, it equally brought upon her the full consternation of the Yellow Shirts. The opposition reorganized and commenced a massive protest movement against her in 2013, and she responded by unleashing her Red Shirt hordes against them. Just like the destabilizing situation that her brother engineered before her, the military was forced to intervene to restore order in the face of the rapidly uncontrollable chaos that had broken out, and the coup authorities led by former Commander in Chief and current Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha are still running the country until new elections can be held.

A New Beginning?:

In a sense, the 2014 coup signaled a new beginning for Thailand in terms of its domestic and economic policies, but at the same time, the main underlying source of internal political destabilization remains. To briefly expand on the latter point, Thaksin’s supporters, the Red Shirts, will stop at nothing to see their political hero return to power, even if they must once more put one of his political proxies into office first. The US is now supporting the Red Shirt movement because it’s extremely unhappy at the foreign policy moves that Chan-o-cha has made. What he’s done is enact a geopolitical reorientation towards China precisely at the time when the US is throwing much of its resources behind the “Pivot to Asia” and building the Chinese Containment Coalition (CCC). While it was predictable that some sort of internal military intervention would have likely occurred to calm the Red Shirt-inspired unrest that had spread throughout the country, the US probably didn’t predict that the coup authorities would so ambitiously alter their country’s geopolitical trajectory.

The US doesn’t care about Yingluck or Thaksin personally, but what it simply wants to see is a loyal pro-American proxy government installed in Bangkok to facilitate the creation of the CCC, and it just so happens that the Shinawatra family has enough convincible (rural) popularity to ‘justify’ their imposition in the eyes of the international community. If need be, the US could conveniently find a fill-in candidate to assist with the political ‘transition’ before either of those two ‘legally’ return to power, but the national vision that Chan-o-cha has set out to achieve is in stark contrast to the US’ plans. Being a professional military man of the nation’s highest caliber, he has deep knowledge about how the US operates within his country, and he’s thus taken to using that privileged information in order to craft the most efficient strategies for combating Washington and ensuring his country’s sovereignty.  No leader in Thailand’s post-World War II history has taken moves as bold as he has to defend his country’s independence, thus making Chan-o-cha’s rise to power completely unprecedented in the history of US-Thai relations. He’s not “anti-American” per say, but it’s just that he does not want to see his country become a sacrificial vassal state in the New Cold War against China, ergo the pragmatic multipolar balancing measures he’s undertaken in accelerating Bangkok’s relations with Beijing (while refraining from open criticism of the US).

Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha

Perhaps most controversially, and what’s triggered the strongest public outcryfrom the US, has been his curtailment of certain civil liberties as a precautionary measure in defending against Washington’s trademarked Color Revolution intrigue. As a military expert, Chan-o-cha is keenly aware of the skill with which the Red Shirts and its US patrons have exploited these rights before, so he undertook the measures that he did in order to ensure that he and his administration can remain in power long enough to see their domestic and international reforms succeed. Unintentionally, however, by almost fully neutralizing the US’ “legal” Color Revolution toolkit, he forced Washington’s strategists into a regime change corner and pressed them to move forward with Unconventional Warfare tactics instead (e.g. the August 2015 Bangkok bombing), albeit of a ‘soft’ and ‘less chaotic’ nature than what has been employed in other battlegrounds like Ukraine. The reason for the US’ relative ‘restraint’ is that it simply wants to engineer the type of destabilizing conditions that can push the military off balance and make it easier for a follow-up Color Revolution to succeed.

Thailand’s hub status in connecting India’s ASEAN Highway to Japan’s ASEAN transoceanic railroad between Myanmar and Vietnam is of the utmost critical importance to the CCC, and it would only be in the most desperate of circumstances that the US would sacrifice these projects in the name of an all-out and uncontrollable destabilization of Thailand. There’s a very real risk, however, that the Hybrid War games that Washington is playing against Bangkok might quickly and expectedly become uncontrollable, thereby needlessly endangering its own allies’ transnational unipolar infrastructure projects all in order to obsessively stop China’s ASEAN Silk Road. Chan-o-cha is therefore facing a quite formidable challenge in opposing the US’ anti-Chinese strategic dictates while simultaneously maintaining domestic stability within his own country. If he can contain the Hybrid War escalation that the US has initiated and proactively deal with the myriad of threats that it might foreseeably unleash in the coming future (whether intentionally or unwittingly), then the military leader will solidify himself as Thailand’s greatest and most successful post-war visionary. Precisely because of the sheer enormity of what’s at stake, however, the US can be expected to employ all possible means of pushing back against him and spoiling his multipolar plans.

Time-Tested Themes

Thailand’s post-World War II history can be summed up by describing five time-tested themes, each of which exhibits immense influence on current events and can expectedly play a role in any forthcoming Hybrid War destabilizations:

Military Management:

Thailand has undergone 19 separate military coups in its history, underscoring the frequency at which the military involves itself in domestic political affairs. The country’s very close relationship with the US has both political and military contours, with the latter being relevant precisely because it demonstrates how deep American influence runs within the Thai establishment. Oftentimes, Thailand’s military coups were the result of domestic squabbles, but the US’ influence over the military meant that Washington could potentially exploit this institution as it saw fit, especially if there was a perceived geostrategic advantage to be had. For example, the 1976 coup may have been triggered by unpredictable protest circumstances, but it convincingly looks to have occurred to the grand strategic advantage of the US.

Observers would do well to remind themselves that the 1973 civilian government asked the US military to leave two years later, which just so happens to be the year that communist forces liberated all of Indochina and won the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The US was unquestionably at a strategic disadvantage through its withdrawal from Indochina and removal from Thailand, and given the “domino theory” fear mongering that prevailed at the time, many decision makers may have sincerely thought that Thailand would be the next country to “fall”. A military government would be more attuned to the US’ strategic interests than a civilian one would, which turned out to be exactly the case in the context of post-1975 Cold War Indochina. Although a civilian government would later be reinstituted, the 1976 coup was responsible for reverting Thailand back to a reliable American proxy state and backpedaling on all of the pro-sovereignty steps that its civilian predecessors had made. Throughout the 1980s, Thailand was working hand-in-glove with the US in supporting Khmer Rouge rebels along its eastern frontier and engaging in a proxy war against Vietnam, whom the US still had a fiery vengeance against.

The US-led annual Cobra Gold exercise in Chonburi province, Thailand

From the perspective of bilateral relations, the Thai military used to be the US’ most dependable instrument of power over the country, essentially functioning as a regional extension of the Pentagon itself (albeit much less poorer). Whenever there’d be some kind of domestic disruption that could be forecasted to possibly result in the temporary diminishment of Thailand’s regional influence (and to a degree, the US’ influence vis-à-vis that country), then the military would step in to restore order and offset that possibility. It’s not to infer that every single coup in Thailand’s history was the result of some American plan, but that the US strategically gained each and every time that this occurred, and it never allowed these sorts of events to negatively impact on bilateral relations. The only exception to this time-tested ‘rule’ has been the 2014 military coup, which Washington did not at all expect to turn out as it did.

Prayun Chan-o-cha obviously planned his moves long in advance, as can be evidenced by the calculated domestic and foreign political steps that he’s undertaken since coming to power. It’s highly unlikely that his geopolitical pivot towards China was a spur-of-the-moment decision, nor was his decree to limit certain civil liberties in order to prevent a Color Revolution against his rule. He clearly had the foresight to identify what steps needed to be done in order to restore and strengthen Thailand’s sovereignty, thus indicating that he had thought long and hard in advance of his actions. Furthermore, Chan-o-cha plainly anticipated that there’d be a strong degree of American pushback against his moves, and that it would be a lot more substantial than the empty window-dressing rhetoric that typically accompanied each of Thailand’s previous coups. For the first time in Thailand’s history, the military isn’t managing the country on the US’ behalf, but is doing so with the Kingdom’s true geopolitical interests at heart.

The American Alliance:

The next mainstay of Thailand’s post-World War II history is the privileged relationship that it’s political, economic, and military elite have enjoyed with the US. This was largely expanded upon above, but to shed some additional insight into it, the US uses key individuals and institutions in order to assert its hegemonic dominance over Thailand. Washington’s utilization of the military for this purpose has just been described, but it does something very similar with the economic and political leaders in the country as well. For example, Thaksin Shinawatra satisfied both criteria in this regard due to his multimillionaire business background and his later leadership over the state, which allowed him to simultaneously exert pro-American influence over these two spheres. While Shinawatra is the most well-known and popular of the bunch, he isn’t by far the only one, as there’s an institutional cadre below him – both within the Red Shirt movement and those not formally affiliated with it – that are promoting the US’ influence within Thailand.

The US’ ideal plan for the Southeast Asian country is for it to become a loyal member of the CCC, capitalizing off of the ‘historic friendship’ that it has with the US in order to ‘justifiably’ transform into a continental version of the Philippines. Just as the insular island chain is Washington’s premier puppet state in the South China Sea, so too does the US want to see Thailand become its mainland equivalent, with both states potentially exercising negative influence on China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) strategy. The Philippines has the possibility of becoming a maritime nuisance in the South China Sea and being built up into the US’ next “unsinkable aircraft carrier”, while Thailand could renege on its commitment to the ASEAN Silk Road. Taken together, Thailand and the Philippines were supposed to be the crucial anchors of the US’ “Pivot to Asia”, but this calculated strategy was thrown into disarray when Chan-o-cha came to power and revealed himself to be a multipolar visionary and a firm proponent of Thailand’s sovereignty. Without Bangkok’s participation in the CCC, the US’ approach to ‘containing China’ has been totally lopsided, as Beijing is able to counter any of Washington’s relative advances on the naval front simply through the existence of its ASEAN Silk Road project.

The US therefore wants to restore its hegemony over Thailand in order to either cancel or control the ASEAN Silk Road, which in either case would nullify China’s strategic ‘detour’ through mainland Southeast Asia and ultimately put its regional trade networks under the Pentagon’s blackmail. It doesn’t seem likely that there’ll be an intra-military coup to overthrow Chan-o-cha, which is why the US is now seeking to leverage the economic and political allies that it still has inside the country. It’ll be described later on more in-depth, but the Red Shirts and their followers are expected to form the vanguard of any future Color Revolution movement, and they could possibly be joined by radical Buddhist monks that follow the Myanmar model of religious-nationalist destabilization. On the economic front, these two groups could encourage their supporters to carry out labor strikes and street traffic disruptions, all in an attempt to grind Bangkok’s economy to a halt as a means of provoking anti-government resentment and Color Revolution sympathy. More institutionally, however, the US could also incentivize its allied economic elite to commence an information campaign extolling the ‘benefits’ of the TPP, which when combined with affiliated NGOs and the aforementioned political actors, could help shape a more robust anti-government campaign by offering a ‘positive vision’ for Thailand after the violent reimposition of pro-American civilian rule. 

In The Shadow Of The King:

Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej

Often neglected by the international media in their coverage of the military-political drama that regularly breaks out in Thailand, the monarchy is one of the most influential institutions in the country and quite frequently the normatively decisive voice that many in the population listen to. The present ruler is King Bhumibol Adulyadej, also known as Rama IX, and he’s been on the throne since 1946. Having presided over the constitutional monarchy for so long, Rama IX has experience in dealing with literally every aspect of Thailand’s post-World War II history, although sometimes his legal restraints have prevented him from exercising his preferred will over whatever the given situation may be. Regardless, he’s revered as a grandfatherly figure that most Thais can depend on, a familiar steward that has the country’s best interests in mind. When Rama IX vocally gives his support in one direction or another, be it to a group of protesters or to the military authorities, it’s seen as a stamp of approval that the population typically abides by.

That being said, at the same time, there’s a movement to decrease the ‘social sanctity’ of the monarch and dispel his normative authority. Thaksin and the Red Shirts are chief among these advocates, and they provocatively want to “modernize” society by removing Rama IX’s influence over it. Many traditionalists oppose the Red Shirts simply on this principle alone, not wanting the most enduring symbol of their past to be sacrificed as a victim of one or another political party, let alone a group which is presently supported from abroad. The Red Shirts are capitalizing off of the country’s anti-defamation laws and the current curtailment of certain civil liberties in order to mock the monarchy and provoke highly publicized arrests, cognizant of the fact that the military authorities would then be cast in a very negative light by sympathetic Color Revolution media outlets in the West. These publicity stunts have infringed on the near-sacred sensitivities that many Thais feel towards their monarch, further heightening the political polarization inside the country and increasing the potential for street clashes between the competing groups.

The pro-American “opposition” inside Thailand therefore intends to whip up emotionally driven tension related to the monarchy issue as a means of both impugning the military authorities and deepening the socio-political divide inside the country. Pro-monarchist Chan-o-cha and his government are enforcing what the average Western individual interprets as “draconian anti-free speech legislation” in imprisoning social media ‘activists’ that criticize and disrespect the King, and the Red Shirts are gleefully manipulating their strategically planned provocations in such a way as to create a false association between the monarchy, the military, and “dictatorships”. This has the effect of generating even more Western civil and governmental support for their “pro-democracy” movement and in preparing the international (Western) consciousness for the policies that they’d like to implement if they’re able to seize power.

Just as Erdogan sought to neuter the military’s capability of carrying out a pro-constitutional coup against his rule, so too will the Red Shirts likely do something similar in order to safeguard their physical position. In parallel, they’ll also make a move against the monarchy so that it can never present a normative threat to their rule again. This would see them either totally eliminating the institution altogether (possibly using the inevitable passing of the elderly king as a trigger for this), or completely sidelining its significance over national affairs by pigeonholing it into irrelevancy just like its Scandinavian counterparts. Both of these policy enactments would generate a storm of controversy within the country, but if the Red Shirts were able to hold on to power and weather the challenge, then they’d qualitatively transform the existence of the Thai state and put it on the trajectory for prolonged one-party rule.

The military is a critical precautionary institution in physically preempting this eventuality, but the monarchy might have even more influence in preventing this process because it’s the only actor capable of galvanizing wide segments of public support in its given direction. If the King came out strongly enough against one or another political party, then that said organization would lose the critical normative approval that’s traditionally needed in Thai society. It doesn’t seem as though Rama IX will ever change his mind and support the Red Shirts, even if they come to power in a Color Revolution, so this is why the movement is so strongly against him. Additionally, his successor and son, Maha Vajiralongkorn, is a military man who inherently understands the importance of that sister institution, so he’d naturally seek to strengthen both of them once he assumes the throne. From the perspective of the Red Shirts, this is a major threat that would undermine everything that they’re working for. Since they don’t feel confident enough in their ability to co-opt either the king or his heir apparent, they’d rather do away with the monarchy entirely than risk having it as a perpetual enemy in the future.

“People’s Power”:

Student’s rally in Bangkok, Oct 1973

The idea of a popular anti-government uprising became enshrined in the Thai consciousness after the 1973 student-led revolution, and from that point on, civilian and military leaders alike became aware of how quickly mass protest movements can topple the state. Likewise, the people learned just how much power they truly have, especially if it’s applied in a strategic way against certain elements of the establishment. This tactical revelation and its successful implementation in 1973 forever changed the nature of Thai politics, although it of course took some time for the lessons to sink into the minds of each respective actor.

The state had to come to terms with the fact that it could be overthrown by a mass of protesting civilians, and that when confronted with such a challenge, it must tread quite carefully in order to avoid enflaming the situation even more. The wrong response, perhaps a militant crackdown leading to a disproportionate number of casualties among unarmed civilians individuals that have nothing to do with the Color Revolution disturbance, could spell the end of the authorities’ rule by generating such a scandal that the newly protesting masses are literally impossible to control without resorting to large-scale and seemingly random violence. On the other hand, the protesters, while conscious of their capabilities, also became familiar with their physical limitations and vulnerabilities. Finding the perfect balance between these two is the ultimate goal of every anti-government leader, and if the right equilibrium is finally struck, then the state is thrust into a grand strategic dilemma that typically results in it making the sort of fatal errors that lead to its imminent downfall.

In Thailand, “people’s power” movements can manifest themselves either in whole or in part as being composed of students (like in 1973), street activists (such as the Red Shirts), and/or Buddhists (following the Myanmar model). Additionally, the term “people’s power” was even trademarked by a political party in Thailand that later turned into a safe haven for Thaksin’s allies following his ouster. The “People’s Power Party” basically functioned as a front organization for the banned Thai Rak Thai Party until it too was dissolved by constitutional order in December 2008. What’s essential to note when describing the role of “people’s power” movements in post-1973 Thailand is that they are one of the most effective methods for enacting regime change, especially in the past decade.

When employed to their full potential against a civilian government, this social weapon can provoke the type of street disturbances and chaotic outbreaks that necessitate a domestic military intervention (coup). Similarly, when it’s turned against the military authorities that have assumed responsibility for the state (as in the current situation), “people’s power” movements can either enact enough pressure against them that they’re forced to step down (like what happened in 1973) or provoke a harsh crackdown that prompts sharp Western criticism and leads to the coup government’s isolation from the Western international community, both of which are unfavorable to the state. The trick here is for the “people’s power” organizers to find the delicate balance between maximizing their physical capabilities and minimizing their associated vulnerabilities, all the while crafting ingenious marketing plans in order to make their movement as societally broad-based as possible. In select circumstances, there’s also the possibility of the Color Revolution vanguards emphasizing identity differences in order to purposefully sow strategic societal differences among the population, which thus leads to a progressively complicated domestic situation for the authorities to deal with. In particular, this sort of scenario forms a critical component of the US’ Hybrid War toolkit in Thailand, and it’ll be expanded upon at the end of the research.

Thaification:

The last time-tested trend in Thailand’s recent history has been the policy of Thaification, modelled off of the culture and dialect of the Central Thai, which is the most populous group in the country. It’s understandable why Thailand ended up promoting a unifying sense of identity. There are many ethnic minority groups concentrated in particular regions of the country, most prominently including the Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand; the Lao-affiliated population of Northeastern Thailand; Khmer in Eastern Thailand; the Muslim Malays of Southern Thailand; and the Karen of Western Thailand. Each of these identities is separately distinct from one another and from the majority Central Thais, yet they all still cumulatively form a minority of the country’s population. The promotion of Central Thai identity as the unifying aspect of Thailand and all “Thais” is not just the expression of the majority’s cultural and dialect preferences over that of the minority, but also that of the literal geographic center over the periphery.

Ethnic Groups in the Greater Mekong subregion

It’s important to keep in mind that the core mass of the population is gathered in the central region, and that this group represents the cradle of Thai civilization. From Bangkok’s perspective, it only makes sense that national cultural standards are modeled off of the Central Thai, as doing otherwise could have been met with uncontrollable revolt among the group most numerically and geographically capable of overthrowing the authorities. That being said, Thaification has not been without its controversies. Some members of the peripheral ethno-regional groups feel that their identities have been infringed upon and that the enforcement of Central Thai cultural standards is leading to an erosion of their own. They worry that the cultural peculiarities that mark their communities will one day be lost, and some have attributed this fear to being one of the reasons behind the Cold War communist insurgency in Northern and Northeastern Thailand. While it’s debatable to what extent identity separateness was to blame for the conflict, it still objectively exists as one of the contributing causes.

The crystallization of ethno-regional identities independently of or in spite of Central Thai-based Thaification is one of the greatest threats to the country’s social and administrative unity. Thailand had been a multicultural society for centuries before the idea of identity homogeneity was first promoted in the 1930s. Ironically, it seems that while the policy itself was designed to eliminate peripheral feelings of separateness and proactively counter possible separatism (which the authorities may have feared could be promoted by the neighboring imperial powers so as to further infringe on the kingdom’s sovereignty), it looks to have had the unintended aftereffect of retaining, and in some cases, even aggravating these issues. Such appears to be the case with Northeastern and Southern Thailand, both of which have a strong and very different sense of ethno-regional identity than the Central Thais do. Isan, as the Northeast is sometimes referred to, is one of the most populous yet impoverished areas of the country, and the people are descended from ethnic Lao and speak a dialect of that language. In the extreme southern provinces, most of the population is Muslim Malay and don’t have anything in common with the Buddhist Thai, be it religion, ethnicity, language, or even a common sense of history.

The identity contrast between the majority population in the governing center and the minority peripheral groups forms the basis for what might under certain circumstances escalate into an existential struggle in defining the nature of the Thai state, let alone whether or not the country itself should even still be referred to as “Thailand”. This prospective scenario of identity conflict, both among the country’s ethno-regional populations and between themselves and Bangkok, is a nascent process that looks to have already begun in part. It hasn’t yet approached the breaking point and exploded into an all-out crisis, but it also hasn’t receded in recent years either. Quite the contrary, identity tension appears to have crept even closer to the mainstream, dragged near the spotlight by Thaksin and his Isan-based populist supporters as part of the political game that they’re playing against Bangkok. If Central Thai-led Thaification and the nominal unity that it espouses come under threat by the Red Shirt supporters in Isan, then the entire social foundation on which post-World War II Thailand rests would be thrown into question, with potentially far-reaching and unpredictable consequences.

Throwing Thailand Into A Hybrid War Tumult

The research has finally progressed to the point where it’s applicable to more comprehensively discuss the Hybrid War scenarios facing Thailand. The previous historical and thematic reviews familiarized the reader with the contextual background that’s necessary in comprehending the intricacies of why the following scenarios are the most plausible ones that could occur. Each of the three could theoretically happen on their own and independently of the others, but it’s highly probable that they’ll follow the sequential order in which they’re examined.

Categorically speaking, they represent the phased transition from a Color Revolution to identity tension and an Unconventional War. It should be reminded at this time that the US would ideally prefer not to totally destroy Thailand in the same manner as it has attempted to do to Syria, thereby meaning that it would like to contain the destabilization to the first and second discussed categories, but if it absolutely needs to sacrifice its Indian and Japanese allies’ unipolar infrastructure projects within the country to destroy the ASEAN Silk Road (or if it can’t control the chaotic forces that it unleashes), then it’ll belatedly accept this eventuality and proceed to the third and final regime change step.

The Red Buddhists:

The pro-American Red Shirts are at the helm of the Color Revolution movement in Thailand, and their aggressive agitation is expected to continue until they either achieve their desired regime change objective or are organizationally crushed by the military (which is of course easier said than done). Their tactical aim is to assemble a widespread and inclusive front of various grievance-motivated protesters in order to form the critical mass of discontented citizens that they need in order to arrange a major destabilization. While this isn’t necessarily an unquestionable prerequisite, it would greatly aid their efforts if they were able to gather a more diverse grouping of ‘human shields’ than those that are simply pro-Thaksin, since any preplanned provocation against the military could realistically result in casualties among those other members and the increased involvement of their respective protesting groups into the Color Revolution movement.

Continuing with this tactical theme, it would be a public relations masterstroke if the Red Shirts were able to co-opt radical Buddhist nationalists such as Phra Maha Apichat Punnajantho into their street demonstrations. The sacred role that Buddhism holds over the nation’s psyche means that many of the masses hold deep respect for the monks that represent it, and the international public is largely unaware of the violent nationalist subsects within this stereotypically peaceful religion. Protesting Buddhist monks, no matter what their nationalist and aggressive intent may be, could conjure up a unifying and normatively positive image that would shift public and international acceptance in favor of the Red Shirts just as equally as it would reflect negatively on the military authorities that they’re demonstrating against. Something almost exactly similar was attempted in Myanmar during the 2007 “Saffron Revolution” and it had the immediate effect of boosting Suu Kyi and her Color Revolution movement’s prestige.

Back then in Myanmar just as it looks to soon be in Thailand, the inclusion of violent Buddhist radicals is actually something that the Color Revolutionaries desire because that would give them cleverly disguised foot soldiers that they could deploy against the military in their oncoming provocations. The media-distorted pictures of supposedly “helpless, unarmed, and peaceful” Buddhist monks being beaten by the military would be presented completely out of context and used to attract new followers that are incensed by the misleading images that they saw. Since most Thais are pious to various extents, what they were artfully made to believe was the military’s use of “wanton violence” against the “peaceful” Buddhist monks could leave an impression on them personally and inspire them to join the protest movement, which in turn would really go a long way in broadening the Color Revolution’s base and generating an inclusive anti-government front.

One of the most effective ways in which the aforementioned front could be expanded to its largest proportions would be if the Red Shirts found a way to more fully incorporate “progressively modernizing” anti-monarchist forces into their ranks. This could of course generate some conflict among the pro-monarchist Buddhists that are involved in the Color Revolution movement, but as with almost all of the politically convenient front organizations that existed before it everywhere else across the world, they might temporarily put aside their visionary differences in favor of uniting to overthrow the government and bicker about their post-regime change preferences afterwards. The death of the elderly King could be a trigger for bringing these sorts of “activists” out to the street, predictably ‘celebrating’ the ‘end of an era’ and proclaiming that the military’s normative authority died with Rama IX. It’s not too important what they take to saying, but rather that they go out to the streets in the first place and are absorbed into the already existing protest movement.

The more radical of the anti-monarch “demonstrators” could even decide to violently target grieving funeral processors and disrupt other commemorative public expressions of sorrow, which would immediately induce an outbreak of communal conflict between the two camps. Predictably, the all-out unrest that would consequently break out would prompt the military to step in one way or the other, and depending on the intensity of the expected riots, this could likely result in a heightened risk of civilian casualties. Again, from the perspective of the Color Revolutionaries, it’s not important exactly who falls victim to the collateral state-inflicted damage that they’ve provoked, but that the victimized individuals and their associated groups (be they ethnic, confessional, professional, etc.) simplemindedly get drawn into the anti-government movement as a reflexive result. If the provocation is serious enough, then it might serve its worth in functioning as a ‘justifiable’ trigger for escalating the Color Revolution hostilities into open urban terrorism, and if tactically synchronized with the prior inclusion of a wide protesting mass united under a single regime change banner, then it could end up being too much for the authorities to handle short of stepping down or commencing the controversial imposition of martial law.

Reforming Thaification: Chao Phraya vs. Mekong:

The greatest domestic challenge that has historically plagued Bangkok since the end of World War II has been in fostering and sustaining a sense of identity unity among its disparate ethno-regional groupings. The authorities can’t of course disregard the culture that the majority Central Thai practice, but at the same time, they can’t fully commit to policies that endanger the culture of the peripheral population and cause them to seethe with anti-government resentment. The need for a national culture is apparent, but the difficulty comes down to how this should be implemented and which identities should contribute to the state-wide standard.  As it stands, only the Central Thai along the Chao Phraya River are officially seen as being worthy to emulate, and this has led to the government-enforced imposition of their culture and dialect onto the rest of the country, which has been especially resented among the Lao-affiliated citizens of the Northeastern and Mekong River regions. While some of the Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand, the Khmer of Eastern Thailand, the Muslim Malays of Southern Thailand, and the Karen of Western Thailand may also take issue with the state’s promotion of the Central Thai identity, they don’t occupy as important of a geo-demographic role as the people of Isan do.

Thailand’s Northeastern region, referred to as Isan by those that support the recognition of its distinct identity (the author is neutral but uses them interchangeably for variety’s sake), contains about a thirdof the country’s territory and a similar percentage of its entire population. Most of its people are engaged in agriculture and it’s one of the poorest areas of the Thailand. What’s significant about Isan is that it recorded the highest rate of growth during the Thaksin-Yingluck years and is regarded as thestronghold of their support within the country. Furthermore, the people there are culturally, linguistically, and historically distinct from the rest of their national counterparts, as most of them are ethnic Lao that socially identify more with their cross-border cousins than with their own countrymen. They may still pride themselves in being Thai citizens, but that doesn’t mean that they accept the government’s official classification of their ethnicity or their Lao-dialect language as “Thai”, and herein lays the crux of what may foreseeably become a looming identity crisis in Thailand.

The Northeastern region’s importance to the national fabric is substantial, be it in human, economic, or geographic terms, and it’s definitely not a part of the country that any leader can afford to ignore. Thaksin was successful in co-opting most of its population because his populist subsidization policies appealed to the impoverished masses, and the undeniable physical infrastructure growth that accompanied the 2000s made many of the locals there lifelong loyalists to his cause. The longer that the Red Shirts agitate against the government, the more likely it is that they’ll capitalize off of their ethno-regional origins up until the point that they publicly embrace their identity separateness and begin formally incorporating into their political platform (possibly following the advice of supportive Western-financed NGOs). While this prospective development could also lead to internal divisions among those that favor the Central Thai standard of Thaification, it could be framed in such a way as though they’re pushing back against a seemingly inherent “racist” and “discriminatory” system, wanting to “reform it from within” more so than flirt with sedition and imply any claims to secessionism (even if that’s what they’d tacitly threaten if their demands aren’t met).

The highly publicized internal and external awareness that Thailand’s major “opposition” movement has officially recognized an ethno-regional distinction separate from the nationally unifying intent of Central Thai-led Thaification would automatically trigger an unparalleled identity crisis within the state, made even more pronounced by the international (Western) pressure that would correspondingly come down to bear upon it at this critical moment.  The perceived failure of Thaificaiton in unifying the masses would lead to a call from the Red Shirts and their foreign patrons that the long-standing ideology be reformed, either through the creation of a compromise national identity that incorporates portions of the peripheral ones, or the casual enforcement or outright cultural autonomy of certain provincial areas. Any formal step in either of these directions would likely be seen as a threat to the Central Thais’ soft power dominance and probably elicit a rebellious response from them, with their newfound rage being directed against the Red Shirts and their Isan supporters and/or the military authorities if they give in to their identity-reforming demands. The Isan Red Shirts might even push for legally enshrined safeguards for their own cultural autonomy, not necessarily because they believe that they’ll actually get this, but because they know the reaction that it will provoke within the country (negative among the Central Thai, positive among all minority groups) and abroad (full Western support).

To expand a bit off of the domestic reaction to such a possible pronouncement, other than the expected violence that this might provoke among the Central Thai, it would probably lead to some minority groups in the North, East, and/or South aligning themselves with the Isan Red Shirts. This is because no single ethno-regional demographic is powerful enough to unilaterally succeed in their identity demands on their own, and even though Isan has the greatest chance of all of them in having this happen, it’s still not guaranteed. However, if other peripheral groups begin siding with them and coordinating certain on-the-ground measures in their support (e.g. anti-government protests and other disruptive rallies), then it could have a noticeable effect in triggering a chain reactive existential threat to the present formation of the Thai state. Once one ethno-regional organization attempts to advance its agenda of constitutionally mandated separateness (no matter how benign and seemingly justified it might appear, such as in safeguarding the widespread use of indigenous languages), let alone if this group teams up and joins together with another of its counterparts elsewhere in the country, then the groundwork is set for easily transitioning this campaign into a political one that agitates for autonomy, federalization, or clear-cut separatism. Should this come to pass in any iteration, then the potential that the governing center could be pitted against an array of peripheral rebel movements would inevitably rise, thus raising fears that the structural model of the Myanmar Civil War would have found its way to Thailand.

The Ethno-Regionalist Civil War:

The outbreak of ethno-regionalist conflict in Thailand would be in direct reaction to the country’s internal identity crisis, with the possibility that certain external variables could aggravate the preexisting tension to the breaking point. Isan is envisioned as being the central battleground, although it’ll likely be supported by one, some, or all of the other peripherally identity-separate parts of the kingdom. In particular, these could be the Hill Tribes of the North, the Khmer of the East, the Muslim Malay of the South, and possibly even the Karen from the West.

All of the possible insurgencies could theoretically be backed up with some element of state support in the event that Thailand’s neighbors undergo their own successful regime change experience, which in that case would dramatically escalate the stakes that are at play.

The US’ desired goal in any of these instances would be to see the Thai authorities weakened by the multidirectional and multi-issued destabilizations to the extent that an accompanying Color Revolution push would be enough to unseat them and restore its proxies into power. Like it was mentioned at the beginning of the research, however, if the ‘final solution’ to getting rid of the ASEAN Silk Road necessitates an all-out civil war that disrupts or even destroys India and Japan’s transnational infrastructure projects in the country, than that’s apparently the price that Washington is willing to pay in order to contain its chief geopolitical rival in the region.

Laos and Isan

If the Laotian government is overthrown and replaced with a pro-American proxy, or possibly even if its new leadership is somehow co-opted by the US and its CCC, then there’s the possibility that it could offer some minimal amount of support to the Isan rebels in this specific scenario. Nonetheless, it’s not predicted that Vientiane would under any circumstances play a major role in a Thai Civil War, partly because its military is too weak and its capital too exposed to withstand a coordinated counter-attack from the Thai Armed Forces, and also due to the fear that it has of being demographically and economically overshadowed by a quasi-independent Lao-identifying Isan. There’s no realistic scenario where the Laotian elites would pursue formal irredentism in Northeastern Thailand because they know that they’d be the junior partner in any forthcoming political structure. The only possible interest that Laos might one day have would be in forming a “union state” with Thailand modeled off of the one that Belarus has with Russia in order to acquire concrete economic and political guarantees without sacrificing its sovereignty, but even then, this possibility is still exceptionally unlikely in the near- or medium-terms barring the emergence of unforeseen and exceptional circumstances.

Cambodia And The Khmer

Moving along in a clockwise direction, Cambodia under the Hun Sen government would be very reluctant to get involved supporting its cross-border ethnic Khmer kin, no matter what happens on the ground in Thailand. China, the government’s main ally, would firmly advise against it at all costs, knowing that even the reporting of rumors that Phnom Penh was as much as considering this could set off a nationalist reaction in Thailand and lead to unpredictable civilian and military actions there. It wasn’t even a full decade ago that the two countries almost went to war over a sliver of territory on their border, so if Bangkok felt as though Phnom Penh might make a far-reaching power grab under the guise of assisting its rebellious cross-border compatriots, then it might disastrously take the prerogative to make a preemptive strike. Another factor to be considered in this scenario is that Sam Rainsy and his oppositionist “Cambodian National Rescue Party” are very nationalistic, so it’s entirely possible that they could use Hun Sen’s reluctance to intervene in a Khmer-involved Thai Civil War as a means of rallying more opposition against him and adding to their Color Revolution cadres. They might even send volunteer groups of fighters to help their ethnic compatriots, and if they’re injured, captured, or killed, it could be enough to provoke an international crisis or trigger a calculated anti-government uprising in Cambodia. Of course, in the event that Rainsy seizes power there (either before or during the possible conflict), then Cambodia would definitely intervene in its neighbor’s ethno-regionalist affairs and contribute to what would predictably by then have become a downward spiraling situation.

Malaysia And The Southern Muslims

On the southern front, the current Malaysian government led by Prime Minister Najib Razak doesn’t seem too inclined to throw its neighbor into disarray, no matter the events surrounding the Muslim Malays there. It doesn’t have an interest in seeing the insurgency explode along its border because of the danger that terrorist groups could infiltrate into the country either independently or under the guise of being “refugees”. Kuala Lumpur’s agenda isn’t to expand its territory or become the protector of its ethnic compatriots living in Thailand, but to see to it that Bangkok guarantees that they have a respectable life free from ethnic, religious, and linguistic discrimination. In all actuality, the most practical way to ensure this and pacify the insurgent groups would be to implement a legally mandated framework similar to what the Philippines has tried to do with the Bangsamoro Basic Law in its own southern Muslim-populated region of Mindanao. Given the Thai context, however, it’s not likely that the government wants to go anywhere near granting the region autonomy, predicting that this would just set off a chain reaction of similar separatist sentiment in the other ethno-regionally diverse parts of the country that would eventually result in the state’s full autonomization, federalization, or political dissolution. Malaysia could facilitate this destructive process if it concedes to any US pressure to militantly assist its transnational ethnic kin (whether directly or indirectly) or if a new Color Revolution government comes to power and pursues a policy a radical ethno-religious nationalism.

Myanmar And The Karen

Finally, the last of Thailand’s neighbors that could possibly get involved in the examined civil war scenario would be Myanmar via its support of the Hill Tribes in Northern Thailand or the Karen in Western Thailand. Both of these identities are separate from the Central Thai, but the Karen pose a greater risk than perhaps any of the other aforementioned ethno-regionalist groups because of their militant experience in fighting the Myanmar Civil War. Most of the Karen living in Thailand are refugees that have fled across the border, but like in any case where there’s a cross-border community of war-ravaged expatriates, some of them are undoubtedly fighters, whether currently retired or presently active in the field. Thailand was ironically suspected of supporting the Karen rebels when they were fighting against the Myanmar government, especially during the Cold War, but in the examined scenario, Myanmar could flip the dynamic around and encourage some of the Karen within its territory to carry out attacks in Thailand. There’s also the possibility that Naypyidaw for whatever reason (be it choice or incompetence) does not take part in this scheme, but that the largely independent non-state actors and ethnic militias active in Kayin State independently do so on their own, possibly invigorated by the idea of cross-border irredentism. This feeling could be further promoted if Suu Kyi’s government advances a federal solution to the country’s civil war and the Karen’s homeland is bestowed with de-facto independence in a broad-based and loosely federated system.

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for the Sputnik agency. He is the post-graduate of the MGIMO University and author of the monograph “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change” (2015). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare.

PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:

Hybrid Wars 1. The Law Of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Wars 2. Testing the Theory – Syria & Ukraine

Hybrid Wars 3. Predicting Next Hybrid Wars

Hybrid Wars 4. In the Greater Heartland

Hybrid Wars 5. Breaking the Balkans

Turkey is already mulling the possibility of closing its border with Syria, amid the ongoing diplomatic fence-mending between Moscow and Ankara, according to the Russian newspaper Izvestia.

The Izvestia newspaper quoted the deputy head of the Russian Lower House’s Defense Committee as saying that during a recent session of the joint Russian-Turkish commission, Moscow specifically stressed the necessity of closing the Turkish-Syrian border.

Viktor Vodolatsky said that the August 11 session was a continuation of Tuesday’s dialogue in St. Petersburg between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“The two, among other things, discussed the peace settlement in Syria, which is why we decided to urge Ankara to close the Syrian-Turkish border in order to stop the flow of terrorists and weapons,” Vodoloatsky said.

He added that the issue is of paramount importance in ensuring Russia’s national security, and that Moscow pledged to provide the Turkish side with satellite images of those areas where it is shown that weapons and militants are being trafficked.

It is safe to say that Ankara will most likely give the green light to the closure of Syrian-Turkish border given the ongoing normalization of relations between Russia and Turkey, according to Izvestia, which cited relevant agreements clinched during the meeting between Putin and Erdogan.

In this context, Igor Morozov, member of the Russian Upper House’s International Affairs Committee, said that with Turkey’s relations with Europe and the US leaving much to be desired, Ankara will now be focusing on developing cooperation with Russia.

It gives Russia a chance to reach a compromise with Turkey on a spate of contentious issue, and under conditions that will be dictated by Moscow, Morozov was quoted by the Izvestia as saying.

“The Turkish negotiators actually have no room to maneuver, and they are poised and ready to arrive at a consensus on difficult issues. This is why they will most likely say “yes” to our proposal to close Turkey’s border with Syria,” he said.

Fidel Castro, the revolutionary icon of the latter 20th century, is 90 today. Steven Walker looks back over his momentous life

Fidel Castro is 90 years old today, and unlike other 90-year-olds, this former Head of State will not receive much acknowledgement in the mainstream media this year but his achievements cannot be overstated.

The fact he is alive at all is testimony to his resilience and fortitude and the failed attempts by the CIA to assassinate him.

He is probably the most iconic revolutionary figure of the 20th Century and the story of his fight to liberate Cuba from external control and American mafia influence in the 1950’s is a shining example of resistance and determination.

Castro decided to fight for the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s military junta by founding a paramilitary organisation known as The Movement.

In July 1953, they launched a failed attack on the Moncado Barracks during which many militants were killed and Castro was arrested.

Placed on trial, he defended his actions and provided his famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech, before being sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.

Renaming his group the 26th July Movement (MR-26-7), Castro was pardoned by Batista’s government in May 1955, who no longer considered him a political threat.

Restructuring the MR-26-7, he fled to Mexico with his brother Raul, where he met with Argentine Che Guevara, and together they set up a small revolutionary force intent on overthrowing Batista.

In November 1956, Castro and 81 revolutionaries sailed from Mexico aboard the Granma and crash-landed near to Los Cayuelos. Attacked by Batista’s forces, they fled to the Sierra Maestra mountain range, where the 19 survivors set up an encampment from which they waged guerrilla war against the army. Boosted by new recruits that increased the guerilla army’s numbers to 200, they co-ordinated their attacks with the actions of other revolutionaries across Cuba.

The Cuban revolution was completed in January 1959 following the final victory led by Che Guevara over government troops in Santa Clara.

Fidel Castro’s 90th birthday offers a chance to consider where he drew inspiration from and the ideas which prompted his band of guerillas to mount a campaign against overwhelming odds.

On the advice of those who noted his passion for argument, Fidel enrolled at the University of Havana in 1945 to study law. A world divided ideologically between Capitalism and Communism stimulated a febrile political atmosphere in university. Two of his earliest university friends belonged to the Communist Youth and he made his first overtly political speech in 1946, criticising the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, Batista’s predecessor.

Fidel was aligned with two main political groupings at university – the Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario (MSR) led by Rolando Masferrer and the Union Insurreccional Revolucionaria (UIR) led by Emilio Trio.

This was where his revolutionary apprenticeship was refined, where he learned much about the nature of Cuban institutions and how steeped in corruption and violence they were.

The two groups jostled for prominence on campus, while outside the corrupt President Ramon Grau San Martin — installed as an American puppet in 1944 — was running Cuba.

Two of the key historical and political events dominating students at Havana University and influencing their beliefs, ideas and perceptions of Cuba’s past and future were the independence struggles of 1868 to 1898 led by Jose Marti, and the revolutionary movement of 1927 to 1933 involving former army officers, students and government officials that had led to the overthrow of President Machado in 1933.

But Fidel recognised that these were incomplete shifts in fundamental power — simply replacing varieties of colonial rulers and corrupt American puppet dictators.

Fidel vowed to succeed in creating a truly independent Cuba, a proper self-determining country led by those on the side of the many rather than the few.

In early 1947 Fidel became increasingly politically active, openly criticising President Grau and Batista for their failed leadership and corruption. His political profile was growing and he was seen prominently as a leading mourner at the funeral of the much-respected communist labour leader Jesus Menendez, who had been shot dead by an army captain in Manzanillo.

In 1948 the Cuban presidency passed to Carlos Prio, who with the influential army officer Batista, gave unparalleled freedom to the American Mafia who accelerated the degeneration of Cuba into what became widely renowned as America’s brothel, where casinos, gambling and gangsterism flourished and the proceeds of organised crime were stashed away from mainland American tax authorities.

The pattern of Fidel’s journey to later succeed in overthrowing the Batista dictatorship in 1959 was being hardened.

What seems to have been of much more significance was to identify with those fellow students and historical Cuban heroes, such as Jose Marti, and satiate his appetite for revolution and insurrection.

Fidel was by now immersing himself in student politics and actively supporting the fight for independence in Puerto Rico and demonstrating solidarity with other student movements in Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama, which were demanding an end to American colonial rule via financed puppet dictatorships.

Eduardo Chibas left the Autentico, the Authentic Revolutionary Party of Cuba, and in 1947 founded the Partido Popular Cubano (PPC- Cuban People’s Party) quickly becoming better known as the Ortodoxo party. Fidel joined immediately, finding in Chibas yet another hero, who he followed with great enthusiasm, regarding him as a man of the future destined to pave the way to Cuba’s independence.

The Ortodoxo party soon established itself as the first serious opposition to the government, fully adopting the principles and values of the revered nationalist martyr Jose Marti for anti-imperialism, socialism, economic independence, political liberty and social justice.

Although the attack on the Moncado barracks in 1953 failed, the trial in the Santiago de Cuba Palace of Justice began on September 21 1953 and ended on October 6 1953, after eleven sessions.

The Cuban civil code of justice, based on the Napoleonic code practiced in Europe and Latin America, had the verdict determined by a panel of three judges rather than by a jury of peers as under common law in the U.S. and Great Britain.

After the accused heard the charges against them, they were called to testify on their own behalf. The defendants were represented by 24 attorneys but Castro, a trained lawyer, assumed his own defence and lied under oath to avoid implicating rebels on trial.

In May 1955 Fidel was released after pressure from his supporters.

Four years later he was in power and now, nearly six decades on, we can raise a glass to him on his 90th despite all the efforts of the CIA.

Steven Walker is the author of Fidel Castro: From Infant to Icon ebook: www.amazon.co.uk/Fidel-Castro-Infant-Steven-Walker-ebook/dp/B00QM7GH4S

We are used to quite a lot of warmongering propaganda against Syria. The “last hospital in Aleppo gets destroyed” – week after week after week, reports by Physicians For Human Rights on Syria turn out to be scams, videos and pictures of “children rescued” by the U.S./UK payed media group “White Helmets” are staged.

But the yesterday released and very well propagandized Open Letter of Aleppo Doctors takes the crown of warmongering anti-Syrian fakes:

We are 15 of the last doctors serving the remaining 300,000 citizens of eastern Aleppo. Regime troops have sought to surround and blockade the entire east of the city.
…

Look who signed that open letter:

Stenographing the letter’s propaganda the Guardian cleverly notes:

It has not been possible to verify the names of all the doctors listed in the letter.

Maybe because these names are those of famous Jihadis? But if only the fake names were the problem …

Notice that there is no general practitioner among those fifteen doctors. This while general practitioners are usually the largest share of medics in any country. Even more astonishingly, six of the fifteen (no. 1, 2, 4, 12, 13, 14) are identify as “pediatricians”.

Hmm – ain’t those supposed to be dead? All of them? Wasn’t the last pediatricians in east-Aleppo killed on April 28?

Our “western” and Gulf governments pay a lot of our taxpayer money for such anti-Syrian warmongering. The “White Helmets” alone receive $60 million. We should at least demand better fakes and more plausible lies for such large expenditures of our money.

Source: Ali Ornek

Ever straddling that fine line between the absurd and the puncturing revelation, Donald J. Trump’s “ISIS” remarks about the Obama administration and the Democrat presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, were vintage.  “[Obama] was the founder of ISIS absolutely, the way he removed our troops. … I call them [Obama and Hillary Clinton] co-founders.”

In a political environment where sarcasm is set aside in favour of serious management and public relations choreography, stage managed with careful insertions for media effect, Trump has other ideas. These may be contemptuous of the archive of history, avoiding evidence like the plague, but every so often, he makes a point that stings.

Wednesday’s comments about the provenance of ISIS – Washington as well-heated incubator, backer, and enthusiastic sponsor – become less absurd in the bloody tangle of Middle Eastern politics. Attempts to locate, always in vain, those goodly scented guys in a foreign conflict to back tend to end up badly.  Wars have a tendency to do that.

The issue of supplying, to take one example, supposed Islamic moderates in the Syrian conflict was always daft to begin with, given that weapons will always find their way to the sides that are stronger.  Fluid loyalties, questionable allegiances, and shifting interests, make notions of the elect impossible. The default tends to be brutal, stabilising authoritarianism imposing a murderous order.

Trump’s response was less a back peddling than a repositioning of his stance.  “Don’t they get sarcasm?” he screamed on Twitter, with capitalised effect.  “I love watching these poor, pathetic people (pundits) on television working so hard and so seriously to try and figure me out.  They can’t!”[1]

The broader commentary on the subject blows more air into the Trump act.  Again, the fundamental error here it to idealise the office of the US president, to see it as unique and near omnipotent.  To receive the electoral verdict is tantamount to a divine voice.  Yet the domain of Camelot will not permit smudging and profanity at the hands of a Trump, even if it has individuals responsible for egregious breaches of laws domestic and foreign.

Trump’s excuse for his ISIS remarks, suggests Tara Golshan atVox, is both “absurd” and “unnerving” but more so because they open the window on “how he’d fare as president.”[2]  Hardly.  For Golshan, it is incumbent that the population of planet earth “take what the president of the United States says very seriously.”

She obviously missed the choice bits of the Bush administration (shrub Dubya), which demonstrated that individuals of even modest intelligence and serious defects can climb the presidential mountain and wreak havoc, spread global unrest and sow the seeds for the next round of catastrophic retribution.  “Presidents don’t go about and constantly ‘joke’ about invading countries, or about their economic policies, or about their political opponents being terrorists.” That may well be largely the problem.

Seriousness is again registered by Don Cassidy at the New Yorker. [3] For Cassidy, what mattered was that Trump had decided to avoid any nuance on the subject.  To conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump was having nothing about suggestions that Obama “created the vacuum, he lost the peace.” What he truly meant was that “he’s the founder of ISIS” deserving of “the Most Valuable Player award.”

What Cassidy ponders is not the prospects of a Trump victory, which he sees as nigh impossible.  Of greater concern was the notion of a punchy lingering “Trumpism”, the sort left to fester and thrive in the aftermath of its founder’s departure.  “A nationalistic , nativist, protectionist, and authoritarian movement that will forever be associated with him, but which also has the capacity to survive beyond him.”

This is Trump as coherent founding father, devilish in going the way of the Know Nothing movement, or the isolationist bodies such as the America First Committee, keen to avoid a global conflagration by seeking the road of appeasement.

For the most part, the issue of temperament remains the common ground for his critics. To be the Commander in Chief comes with a certain, heavy resume.  Never mind that the resume itself is stocked with flimsy assumptions about quality and capabilities.

No, the business of waging war, interfering in the sovereign affairs of other states, and the entire gamut of empire, is a serious matter that no joke could dissipate.  The shock for those paying attention to Trump is that he cares to disturb and molest such shibboleths with regular abandon. The business of empire is certainly lots of fun for some people.

That US foreign policy has consequences is hardly the surprise, but the queasiness comes in the reminder as to how far those consequences really do go.  ISIS may not be on the public pay roll of the US Treasury as a matter of direct attribution, but the Iraq invasion of 2003, led by the United States, was the very fillip for the creation of the group.  Founding and causation are different in this case, but such subtleties are conveniently obliterated in the polemics of Election 2016.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

Notes

[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/764064821000056832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[2] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/12/12453452/trump-obama-founded-isis-sarcasm-serious

[3] http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-trumps-crazy-talk-about-obama-and-isis-matters

It is Israel’s darkest secret – or so argues one Israeli journalist – in a country whose short history is replete with dark episodes.

In a tiny hamlet at the heart of the cotton belt in northern India, Ramandeep Mann planted Monsanto’s genetically modified Bt cotton seed for more than a decade, but that changed after a whitefly blight last year.

Mann’s 25-acre farm in Punjab’s Bhatinda district now boasts “desi,” or indigenous, cotton shrubs that promise good yields and pest resistance at a fraction of the cost.

Mann is not alone.

Thousands of cotton farmers across the north of India, the world’s biggest producer and second-largest exporter of the fiber, have switched to the new local variety, spelling trouble for Monsanto, the Creve Coeur-based seed giant, in its most important cotton market outside the Americas.

The Indian government is actively promoting the new homegrown seeds, having already capped prices and royalties that the world’s largest seed company is able to charge.

“Despite the whitefly attack, farmers in northern India are still interested in cotton, but they are moving to the desi variety,” says Textile Commissioner Kavita Gupta.

Official estimates peg the area planted with the new variety at 178,608 acres in northern India, up from roughly 7,413 acres last year.

That is still a tiny percentage overall, and most farmers in the key producing states of Gujarat and Maharashtra are sticking to Monsanto’s GM cotton, which has been instrumental in making India a cotton powerhouse.

And the impact of whitefly, a pest that thrives in dry weather, may not be as big this year, as monsoon rains are likely to be plentiful. Experts said two straight droughts fanned last year’s infestation.

But the new seed is still a setback for Monsanto, which has also been hit by a roughly 10 percent decline in cotton acreage in India this year as farmers switch to crops like pulses and lentils in the aftermath of the whitefly blight.

Seed sales slide

Monsanto’s Bt cotton sales in India have fallen 15 percent so far in 2016, said Kalyan Goswami, executive director of the National Seed Association of India.

The firm, which last year sold some 41 million packets of Bt seeds in India, could stand to lose up to $75 million due to lower sales and the steep cut in royalties enforced by the government earlier in 2016, according to Reuters calculations.

The company, which unsuccessfully challenged India’s decision to slash royalties in court, declined to comment for this article.

But in the wake of the whitefly infestation, Mahyco Monsanto Biotech (India) Pvt. Ltd., a joint venture with India’s Mahyco, said last year that Monsanto and its Indian licensees marketed their product as resistant to bollworms, not other pests.

Some experts were optimistic the indigenous cotton seeds developed by the Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR), which comes under the farm ministry, would catch on over time.

“Just wait for the crucial three to four years to see a complete, natural turnaround. By then most farmers will give up Bt cotton and go for the indigenous variety,” said Keshav Raj Kranthi, head of CICR.

Kranthi said planting a hectare with the Indian variety cost less than half the farmers paid to sow Bt cotton over the same area, and the crop yield was almost as high.

Unlike genetically modified seeds, farmers could also store and replant the local seeds the following year, he added.

Some experts voiced caution over the new variety, however.

“By all accounts, the indigenous cotton looks pretty promising, but it will be put to test this year,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent food and trade policy analyst. “It’s a potential game changer, but it has to succeed first.”

Bollworms reappear

Experts began raising doubts last year about the resilience of Monsanto’s lab-altered Bt seeds, which still account for more than 90 percent of the cotton seeds sold in India.

Monsanto’s Bollgard II technology, introduced in 2006, was slowly becoming vulnerable to bollworms, they said, as any technology has a limited shelf life.

Kranthi cited the increase in insecticide consumption as a sign of rising pink bollworm infestation.

In 2015 cotton farmers used an average 1.20 kg of insecticides per hectare (about 1.07 pounds per acre), up from 0.5 in 2006 (about 0.44 pounds), when Bt cotton seeds were at the pinnacle of their productivity.

Between 2006 and 2015, fertilizer consumption for the cotton crop doubled to 270 kg per hectare (about 240 pounds per acre), said Kranthi, indicating rising costs of cultivation and stagnating yields of Bt cotton.

But the more pressing concern for many has been whitefly, with farmers like Mann answering the call from India’s farm ministry and state agriculture universities to switch to local seeds to fight it.

“The only other option we had this year was to plant the Bt cotton again or leave the land fallow. Both were fraught with economic risk, and to obviate that risk we decided to plant the desi variety,” he said. ($1 = 66.75 rupees)

Outrageous: Slobodan Milosevic cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. But no-one is talking about it!

The ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) has discharged Slobodan Milosevic from 1992-95 Bosnian war crimes allegations. This is definitely prime time news, while it holds endless political implications. Oddly enough, though, no major international mainstream media seems to have noticed.

Well, it is understable for everyone to be keeping it quiet: those who with one voice did dub him the “butcher of the Balkans”; those who associated him to Hitler, initiating a pattern which would later be extended to Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and which many would like to stretch further on to Bashar al-Assad. It is easy to read in the silence of the West’s chancellors, most notably the United States’, who doomed Yugoslavia and willed the end of Milosevic.

They may well do that, since Slobodan Milosevic’s “rehabilitation” is nowhere to be seen yet. The court ruling where to look for is the one which led the same court to issue a 40-years sentence for Radovan Karadzic. Therefore, one is to read through the bulky papers ruling before being able to realize that Milosevic was not guilty for the charges for which he spent the last five years of his life behind bars and encircled by universal shame. That’s the trick. Karadzic’s sentence dates back to 24th March of this year. We’re halfway through August and the worldwide mainstream media are not even remotely showing any sign of awareness. Or they figure it is more convenient not to.

This way, no Western leader is going to have to apologize at all, to Yugoslavia, to Serbia, to the unwitting peoples of Europe. Actually, if we knew better, it would be their turn to be sitting on the stand now. Precisely in that 24th March ruling, the court who tried Milosevic stated that “the Chamber is not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan” (ICTY, Karadzic Judgment, 24 March 2016, Para. 3460) demanded by the Serbs to expel Bosnian muslims and Croato-Bosnians out of Bosnian territory.

Yet, the wording here is willingly blurry. The point is not “sufficient evidence”. The same sentence reaffirms more than once, and by quoting documented evidence, the existence of substantial divergences between Milosevic and Karadzic in several crucial turnpoints of that mournful crisis. For instance, the ruling assessed that Milosevic opposed the decision of establishing a Serb Republic.

More than a few other instances have now surfaced, revealing what was already well-known to those who genuinely wished to know: that is, Milosevic had been striving to the end – namely, the set off of NATO bombings over Serbia- to strike an agreement with Western leaders – and it was Mme Albright who decided no-one was to sign that deal.

Five years of prison – the last of his life- were agreed for up in high European and US headquarters, in utter disrespect for any form of justice and in the name of an act of abuse by means of which Yugoslavia has been torn apart and shattered to bits. And his death in prison took place in highly suspicious circumstances and blatantly inhuman conditions. Officially, he died from a heart attack. However, that came two weeks after the Court had denied him permission to be treated in Russia, as he had requested. The former Yugoslavian President died in his cell three days after his lawyer had managed to send a letter to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote he feared of being poisoned.

We do know now what kind of “justice” was the one that Court was after: the victor’s. They now clear Milosevic’s name, while still concealing their persuasion. It is no act of carelessness. Korean justice O-Gon, who presided Karadzic’s trial, was also to be found in the lot who tried Milosevic, that is until he died. That justice had deep insight in both trials’ works and records. We are but left with wondering on whose payroll he and his honorable colleagues might be. The West is drowning in its own filth, along with those values it shamelessly claims everyday to be willing to protect.

Author: Giulietto Chiesa

Translation: Oliviero Martini

Giulietto Chiesa is one of the best known Italian journalists. He was Moscow correspondent for twenty years for “L’Unità” and “La Stampa”. He worked with all major Italian television channels, from the TG1 to TG3 and TG5 and is currently political analyst for major Russian television channels. He is the only Italian journalist to be repeatedly mentioned in the autobiography of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he has repeatedly interviewed. He writes a blog for “Il Fatto Quotidiano”. His own blog is http://www.megachip.info/. He is founder and director of Pandoratv.it web tv. An expert in international politics and communications scholar, he founded the political-cultural movement “Alternativa”. Among his credits there are some best-sellers such as “Endless War”, “Superclan” (with Marcello Villari), “Barack Obush” (with Pino Cabras) and the movie “Zero, an inquiry into 9/11”. He is one of the initiators of Sofia Club and of the Delphi Inititative. His new book, “Putinophobia” is to come out simultaneously in France, where the author was invited as a guest at the Paris Book Fair, and in Russia.

Given the increasing hysteria of the media’s current reporting of the situation in Syria, which may well be the precursor of more violence to be rationalised as “humanitarian intervention”, we’re returning to our ongoing series on the BBC’s “Saving Syria’s Children” documentary and the numerous problems arising from it (see our previous articles here and here).

If you have been following and if you’ve read Robert Stuart’s excellent investigation, you’ll know the BBC Panorama program in question featured a doctor named Rola Hallam, who works with the charity “Hand in Hand For Syria”, and who – according to the program – just happened tp be present at the Atareb hospital in Syria, with a Panorama film crew when a “chemical attack” occurred nearby at a school in Aleppo.

We’ve already covered many of the reasons to question or even reject portions of this narrative, as well as some of the issues surrounding the charity Hand in Hand For Syria, but this short film airs yet another area of doubt. Was/is Rola Hallam’s father, Mousa al-Kurdi, just “a gynaecologist” as Rola herself claims, or is he in fact a senior figure in the major opposition group – the Syrian National Council?

There is a good deal of evidence for the latter, as Robert Stuart shows:

The question matters, of course, because the daughter of “a gynaecologist” can be presented as a non-political figure simply concerned with “saving Syria’s children”, whereas the daughter of a senior figure in the Syrian National Council – a major force in the campaign to remove Assad – can’t be viewed in such a light.

Is this why Hallam conveniently forgets to mention this aspect of her dad’s career? You be the judge.

On the same topic we need to ask why other members of the “Hand in Hand” charity have been photographed wielding “a cornucopia of armaments”?

More on that at a later date.

Uncharacteristically, Myanmar’s Ministry of Information-run newspaper, the Burmese-language Myanma Alinn Daily, levelled commentary toward neighbouring Thailand. It is uncharacteristic, because until of late, the paper and the Ministry of Information itself has generally refrained from commenting on the politics of other nations.

And not only did the Ministry of Information-run newspaper comment on Thailand’s politics, it did so in a way supporting a wider Western-crafted narrative attempting to undermine the legitimacy of Bangkok’s current government in order to pave the way in the region for yet another American-European backed political front, the first being that of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar itself.

Reuters’ article, “Myanmar paper: Thailand risks ‘substandard democracy’,” would report:

A state-run newspaper in Myanmar says Thailand risks “substandard” democracy if a military-backed draft constitution is approved in a referendum on Sunday.The irony of the comment is hardly lost on voters and political observers alike across the region. For decades Myanmar suffered economic stagnation under harsh military rule while Thailand was seen as an Asian “tiger” economy with extensive freedoms and a developing democracy.

Reuters would further report:

“If the draft of the constitution in Thailand were to be approved in the upcoming referendum, the democracy in that country would become substandard and limited,” said an editorial in the Burmese-language Myanma Alinn Daily, which is run by the Ministry of Information and rarely comments on politics in other countries.Zaw Htay, a spokesman for Aung San Suu Kyi, asked if the editorial reflected the government’s official position, referred questions to the Ministry of Information.

The US State Department-Trained Minister of Information

Myanmar’s new Minister of Information is Pe Myint, who according to the Myanmar Times article, “Who’s who: Myanmar’s new cabinet,” is (our emphasis):

Formerly a doctor with a degree from the Institute of Medicine, U Pe Myint changed careers after 11 years and received training as a journalist at the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation in Bangkok. He then embarked on a career as a writer, penning dozens of novels. He participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1998, and was also editor-in-chief of The People’s Age Journal. He was born in Rakhine State in 1949.

To understand why Pe Myint’s training at the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation in Bangkok (IMMF) is key, readers must turn to Wikileaks and a US diplomatic cable titled, “An Overview of Northern Thailand-Based Burmese Media Orgranizations.”

In it, it states (our emphasis):

Other organizations, some with a scope beyond Burma, also add to the educational opportunities for Burmese journalists. The Chiang Mai-based Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, for instance, last year completed training courses for Southeast Asian reporters that included Burmese participants. Major funders for journalism training programs in the region include the NED, Open Society Institute (OSI), and several European governments and charities.<

The diplomatic cable would also reveal that:

A number of active media training programs attract exiles and those from inside Burma to Chiang Mai for journalism courses ranging from one week to one year. These training programs identify would-be journalists who are active in communities inside Burma, as well as NGOs in Thailand, and help them secure reporting positions with Burmese media outfits in the region. The training programs help ensure that future generations will be able to succeed the founders of the current organizations.

Finally, to put into perspective just how directly the training of journalists from Myanmar and the funding of their media operations upon graduation serves US interests, the US cable would admit:

In a refreshing take for U.S. diplomats interacting with foreign media, the exile journalist community here remains steadfastly pro-American. Groups such as DVB and The Irrawaddy continually seek more input from U.S. officials and make frequent use of interviews, press releases and audio clips posted on USG websites. A live interview with a U.S. diplomat is a prized commodity, one even capable of stoking a healthy competition among rival news organizations to land a scoop. A 2006 Irrawaddy interview with EAP DAS Eric John multiplied into several articles and circulated widely throughout the exile community and mainstream media.USG funding plays some role in this goodwill…

In essence, US-European government cash is being used to construct an entirely parallel media network both inside and outside Myanmar. And it was from this US-European network that the current Minister of Information was drawn.

US Uses Parallel Institutions to Overwrite National Sovereignty Pe Myint, even as recently as this year, still participates in US government-funded activities, including the January 2016 Information Symposium (.pdf) held in Yangon. His “goodwill” toward the US and its interests are likely still a residual effect of the large sums of money Washington and the capitals of Europe have invested in him as he worked his way up into the highest levels of power within Myanmar’s government.

Likewise, the US runs a variety of other training programs and NGOs focusing on governance, law, legislation, education and many other aspects a modern nation-state needs to function, but also aspects Myanmar already has.

The purpose of creating an alternative system parallel to Myanmar’s existing institutions is to eventually reach critical mass, achieve regime change, then completely replace Myanmar’s existing institutions with those completely controlled by the US government and the special interests it represents.

It is, in other words, the manifestation of modern-day imperialism, the same imperialism Myanmar had fought against nearly a generation ago to escape, only to find itself now fully enveloped by again.

That the current Minister of Information in Myanmar is using his position and the state’s newspapers to propagate narratives in line with US and European geopolitical interests, and the fact that he was quite literally trained by the US State Department’s ecosystem of NGOs in Southeast Asia is no coincidence. This is precisely how global centres of power throughout the entirety of human history have exercised and projected their power far beyond their borders, across the globe in hegemonic pursuits.

Myanmar’s unravelling national sovereignty, with institutions at the highest levels of power now virtually run by the US State Department and its army of collaborators, is a warning to the rest of the region regarding both the true purpose and objectives of foreign-funded NGOs and the threat to national security they truly represent.

Inside the Mind of a Collaborator

Finally, it is worth looking back at the history of European colonialism to understand just why in any given nation there are those willing to trade national sovereignty, freedom and independence for a role, however minor, in the hegemonic designs of a foreign power.

Perhaps there is no better way to put it than the words published in the “International Journal of African Historical Studies,” in a paper titled, “African Collaborators and Their Quest for Power in Colonial Kenya,” by Evanson N. Wamagatta.

In the paper it states:

[Referring to collaborators] They were collectively “an indispensable channel through which the dictates of imperial rule are handed down; and up through them are transmitted the responses and reactions of the governed.” There were many individuals who aspired to collaborate because the allure of what colonialism had to offer. Collaboration attracted those who hoped to benefit from the wealth, power, prestige, and influence derived from the colonizers, and thereby preserve or improve their social, political, or economic standing.

Myanmar has little to gain itself, as an independent nation, risking a diplomatic row with neighbouring Thailand by commenting on Thailand’s internal politics. However, it does have much to gain as an intermediary for the United States and Europe, or at least Minister Pe Myint does.

While Reuters refers to “irony” regarding what it claims is a reversal of regional roles for Myanmar and Thailand, the real irony lies in Myanmar posing as a freer nation today, despite being closer than ever to reverting back to its days under foreign subjugation.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

http://journal-neo.org/2016/08/11/how-the-us-took-over-myanmars-ministry-of-information/

Few would dispute that Hillary Clinton is the Establishment’s candidate. It’s widely accepted that the Establishment hews to a neoconservative (neo-con) foreign policy that is fully supported by America’s Deep State, i.e. the centers of state power that don’t change as a result of elections.

As a result, it’s widely accepted that “the Deep State” fully supports Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency and will move heaven and earth to get her elected. While this is a logical premise, I suspect it’s overly simplistic. I suspect major power centers in the Deep State are actively sabotaging Hillary because they’ve concluded she is a poisoned chalice who would severely damage the interests of the Deep State and the U.S.A.

Poisoned chalice: something that seems very good when it is first received, but in fact does great harm to the person/ institution/ nation that receives it.

I realize this may strike many as ludicrous, but bear with me as we work through the notion that the Deep State would prefer Trump to Hillary.

The consensus view seems to be that the Establishment and the Deep State see Trump as a loose cannon who might upset the neo-con apple cart by refusing to toe the Establishment’s Imperial line.

This view overlooks the possibility that significant segments of the Deep State view the neo-con strategy as an irredeemable failure and would welcome a president who would overthrow the remnants of the failed strategy within the Establishment and Deep State.

To these elements of the Deep State, Hillary is a threat precisely because she embraces the failed strategy and those who cling to it. From this point of view, Hillary as president would be an unmitigated disaster for the elements of the Deep State that have concluded the U.S. must move beyond the neo-con strategic failures to secure the nation’s core interests.

There are other reasons why elements of the Deep State view Hillary as a poisoned chalice.

1. Hillary is an empty vessel. Nobody seriously claims she has any core beliefs that she would make personal sacrifices to support. While at first glance this may seem to be a plus, the Deep State is not devoid of values. Rather, the typical member of the Deep State has strong values and distrusts/ loathes people like Hillary who value nothing other than personal aggrandizement.

Hillary’s sole supreme commitment is the further aggrandizement of wealth and power to her family. This makes her intrinsically untrustworthy to the Deep State, which has bigger fish to fry than the Clinton Project of aggrandizing wealth and personal power.

2. Hillary has exhibited the typical flaw of liberal Democrats: fearful of being accused as being soft on Russia, Syria, Iran, terrorism, etc. or losing whatever war is currently being prosecuted, liberal Democrats over-compensate by pursuing overly aggressive and poorly planned policies.

The forward-thinking elements of the Deep State are not averse to aggressive pursuit of what they perceive as American interests, but they are averse to quagmires and policies that preclude successful maintenance of the Imperial Project.

3. The Deep State requires relatively little of elected officials, even the President. A rubber stamp of existing policies is the primary requirement (see the Obama presidency for an example).

But the Deep State prefers a leader that can successfully sell the Deep State’s agenda to the American public. (President Obama has done a very credible job of supporting the Imperial Project agenda. I think it’s clear the Deep State supported President Obama’s re-election.) A politician who’s primary characteristic is untrustworthiness is poorly equipped to sell anything, especially something as complex and increasingly unpopular as the Imperial Project.

4. Hillary suffers from the delusion that she understands power politics and the Imperial Project. The most dangerous President to the Deep State is one who believes he/she is qualified to set the Imperial agenda and change the course of the Deep State as their personal entitlement.

For these reasons, elements of the Deep State might sabotage Hillary’s campaign as the greater threat to American interests. Trump is as unpopular as Hillary, but his sense of self-aggrandizement and narcissism is of a different order than Hillary’s. Elements of the Deep State may view Trump as more malleable (or more charitably, as more open to much-needed changes in U.S. policies) and a better salesperson than Hillary.

Although it’s difficult to identify specific evidence for this, the Deep State is not as monolithic as the alternative media assumes. An increasingly powerful sector of the Deep State views the neo-con agenda as a disaster for American interests, and is far more focused on the Long Game of energy, food security, economic and military innovation and a productive response to climate change.

Trump is less wedded to the neo-con agenda than Hillary, less concerned with looking weak and more willing to cut new deals to clear the path for U.S. soft power (diplomacy, cultural influence, energy, food security, economic innovation and successful responses to climate change) rather than the neo-con obsession with hard power and the old-style Great Game of geopolitics.

So how could the forward-looking elements of the Deep State sabotage Hillary? I can think of several ways:

1. Engineer a protracted stock market decline that hits American voters in their pocketbooks before the election by gutting the “wealth effect.” A plunging stock market would make a mockery of the claim that the economy is “recovering.”

2. Continue to leak dirty laundry on Hillary, her health, the Clinton foundation scams, etc.

3. Put the word out to the corporatocracy, top-level media, etc., that the Deep State would prefer a Trump presidency, despite the widely held assumption that Clinton is the shoo-in Establishment candidate, and that those who cling to Hillary will pay a price later on as the neo-cons are cashiered or sent to Siberia for their failures.

Maybe Hillary is the Deep State’s shoo-in for president. But I suspect doubts in the Deep State have advanced to active sabotage for the reasons noted above.

An exhibition entitled ‘Hidden Holocaust’ will expose the facts behind WW2 genocide at the Jasenovac to the United Nations after decades of suppression. The exhibition is the work of most acclaimed living film director of the Balkans Emir Kusturica.

28. Jun, the largest Serbian diaspora organisation, is being singled out to market and brand the landmark exhibition.

The exhibition will be held at the United Nations in New York on Holocaust Remembrance Day which falls on April 23, 2017. 28. Jun will partner with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia, the Andric Institute, the University of Belgrade and the Jasenovac Research Institute, on what promises to be largest exposé on the concentration camp ever organized in the West. Over 500,000 Serbs, 40,000 Roma, 33,000 Jews and 127,000 Anti-Fascists, including many Croats, were executed in the camp complex from 1941 to 1945.

Worldwide Serbian charity and Diaspora organisation, 28. Jun says:

We plan to counter the rise of extremism and anti-Serbism which has swept Croatia since the formation of the new nationalist government. The organization led the Oluja remembrance march in Belgrade last Friday, forced the leading German dictionary to redefine ‘Ustase’ two weeks ago and successfully completed the digital #NoKosovoUnesco campaign in late 2015. In addition to its anti-defamation projects, 28. Jun is the largest Serbian humanitarian organization in the world, having delivered $4.6 mil worth of aid to Serbs throughout the Balkans since 2011.

A countdown to the exhibition, with moving images of the terror at Jasenovac is online at:

www.hiddenholocaust.info

28-year-old whistleblower, Private Chelsea Manning, currently serving a 35 year sentence at Kansas’ Fort Leavenworth, tried to kill herself on July 5.  As a result of her suicide attempt, she now faces further punishment including possible indefinite solitary confinement.

Manning, who was first taken into custody in 2010 had already been subjected to solitary confinement for 9 months, even before she was convicted.  Manning’s supporters believe that the long stretches in solitary confinement since her conviction and lack of essential medical care have contributed to her mental deterioration.

Manning’s attorney Chase Strangio of the ACLU and legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, known best for his role in exposing the Pentagon Papers which revealed failing U.S strategy in the Vietnam War, both explained the significance of the U.S government’s further punishment of Chelsea Manning during a press conference call earlier today.

According to Strangio, Manning’s “loss of access to phone calls, the prison library, and not getting medical treatment for gender dysphoria,” while “cutting Chelsea off from her outside support” is how the government is “destabilizing her mental health.” She also added that if there are other such suicide attempts in solitary confinement in Leavenworth, “the government does not make such information public.”

When asked whether this was grounds to sue for “mental anguish,” Strangio replied that the ACLU had already sued Department of Defense and Department of Army officials “for their failure to provide necessary medical treatment for her gender dysphoria” but “would consider further legal action” if warranted.

Strangio also explained that the “arbitrary administrative charges” which Manning faces, “are designed to make anything a violation. Even possessing a tube of expired toothpaste, which a prisoner has no control over, can be used against them.”

Daniel Ellsberg, who himself was threatened with 115 years in prison for leaking to the press, top secret information about U.S. Decision-making in the Vietnam war, described Manning “a personal hero”. Ellsberg’s leak led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon, after which Ellsberg had his own charges dropped in 1973. Ellsberg stated in the press conference that he believes the primary motive for such a lengthy sentence for Manning was because U.S government officials feared possible indictments as a result of Manning’s leaks.

Ellsberg explained that Manning’s disclosures revealed such incriminating information as “turning over Iraqi prisoners for torture, widespread use of assassination teams, and blatant war crimes” which Ellsberg said made U.S officials “liable for criminal prosecution in International Criminal Court (ICC).” While admitting that “the chances of the U.S accepting the ICC’s jurisdiction and actually prosecuting the former U.S president or other U.S officials was virtually zero,” Ellsberg added that “further investigation would reveal even more such incriminating information” and viewed Manning’s lengthy prison sentence as “retaliation for providing evidence that could be used against U.S officials.”

Ellsberg stated that Manning’s leaked info was “actually less classified” than the Pentagon Papers, and added that the government “had never proven in court that any harm resulted from Manning’s leaks. He further criticized the government for “misusing the Espionage Act which was meant for spies and not for whistleblowers acting in the public interest.”

Ellsberg firmly stated that he considered Manning “a political prisoner” and said that both Manning and Edward Snowden deserved political asylum as both of them were acting to inform the American public and not out of malice. Ellsberg noted that Snowden fled the U.S after seeing how Manning was treated and that most countries did not offer Snowden asylum for fear of antagonizing the U.S, with the exception of Russia, where Snowden currently resides.

Ellsberg was also critical of the military court that convicted Manning “without ever giving her a chance to bring up her reasons for her actions” which Ellsberg said was “unconstitutional.”

As a whistleblower himself, Ellsberg felt that leaking the Pentagon Papers was “the right choice” and that he would “like to see more Chelsea Mannings.” Ellsberg also described Manning as “extraordinarily patriotic and humane” and called her suicide attempt “understandable.” Ellsberg further criticized the U.S government’s treatment of Manning. “These new charges and mistreatment is meant to break her down. It is sadistic and outrageous.”

This morning, Manning’s supporters delivered a petition with 115,000 signatures to the Secretary of the Army demanding the Army drop charges stemming from Manning’s July 5 suicide attempt. Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, said, “The U.S. government’s treatment of her will be remembered as one of the most shameful abuses of power in our nation’s history. Everyone who cares about human rights should be speaking out against this cruelty and injustice right now.”

Gauri Reddy is an investigative journalist, filmmaker, human rights advocate and self-proclaimed treehugger.

It is obvious to most in the world that the U.S. and Israel are symbiotically linked to each other – each using the other for their own purposes, some of which are common, others that are not.  In Obstacle to Peace Jeremy Hammond dissects current events and the relationships between the two countries demonstrating that the biggest obstacle to peace in Israel-Palestine is the U.S.    The focus is narrowed down to the specific relationship between the U.S. and Israel and does not delve into U.S. ambitions for the greater Middle East (which would still centre, if not focus, on Israel).  It is also much less a history than it is an examination of the methods by which the U.S. plays its role. 

In his preface, Hammond says, “I have tried to  write the book so as not to require an extensive prior knowledge of the subject to be able to understand it…to be accessible to a broader audience…willing to commit the time to developing a well informed opinion.”  As a well informed reader I cannot say whether it would well and truly do this, but the language used and the actual structure of the book would make  it accessible to a broad audience.

It is a detailed work concentrating on the combination of actions and language concerning the U.S.’ supporting role for Israel.  The physical actions, the identifiable events of history, could be presented in a much shorter work for the time span covered.  It is in the realm of language –  agreements  (written or otherwise),  media representations, speeches, discourses,  and the many elements of international law – affecting, describing, attributing, manipulating – where the bulk of Hammond’s presentation concentrates.

The latter element, international law, assumes a position front and centre in Hammond’s arguments.  Both the U.S. and Israel rationalize their actions by referring to international law but they do so essentially by attempting to “manage perceptions”, create their own “narrative”, utilize the Chomsky described vehicle of “manufactured consent” all the while operating with a set of “double standards”.  Hammond makes an intense and well structured ‘deconstruction’ of the misleading language, the obfuscation, the fog of jargon utilized by U.S. and Israeli politicians, pundits and media of all kinds.

Without getting into the details of his arguments (I leave that for the reader to read about), several things stand out.  One of the standouts is the U.S. media complicity/subordination, while ironically Ha’aretz of Israel frequently is much more critical – and accurately so – than the U.S. mainstream media.   Another feature that works slowly into light is the quisling nature of Abbas’ ruling power.  Essentially he is helping Israel control the Palestinian people.  This is recognized by both Israel and the U.S. (and by Abbas)  as the threat to cut funding to the PA is viewed as more political fodder for the public but if carried through would be detrimental to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.  From the latter rises the idea that war is the answer, that peace is not in the interests of either the U.S. or Israel for geopolitical and economic and other domestic reasons.

The largest element however is language – the language used for  customary  and coded international law.

There are essentially two types of international law: customary law, informal, unwritten rules deriving from ‘state practice’ and objective obligations;  and treaty law, contractual written agreements intent on creating binding rights and obligations.  The UN Charter, the various Geneva Conventions, trade agreements, environmental agreements are all part of the latter treaty law. [1]

Obviously there are different interpretations of both the customary and treaty laws, but there is sort of a law of laws, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, that says, “A treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context…”[2]  Thus, if the ordinary meaning is to be understood in context, then to support a position that would under the ‘ordinary meaning’ be against international law, it becomes necessary to change the context.[3]  However the reality of the context can only be changed by managing its presentation.

Changing the context is done through the methods described by Hammond throughout his presentation: alter the narrative, use double standards,  manage perception, manufacture consent.  It is in this area where Hammond does a superb thorough deconstruction of Israeli/U.S. attempts to change the context to fit their own denial of international law as it pertains to them.

As an example, this is shown by their attempts to stop Abbas from seeking statehood recognition within the UN.  That accession would change the manner in which the various parties interact, and change the global view of how to deal with the situation in Israel/Palestine.  It also reaches farther, as exemplified by the great fear of Palestinian accession to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which asks the question, if what you (Israel-U.S.) are doing is so in compliance with international law, why is there this fear of Palestine having recourse to the ICC?

One of my favorite neocons, John Bolton, “mindful of its [U.S.] complicity and the possibility of future prosecution for war crimes at the ICC….warned “to convoke the International Criminal Court is like putting a loaded pistol to Israel’s head – or, in the future, to America’s.” (p. 407) Why, Mr. Bolton, why?

The UNESCO and  ICC cases, presented towards the end of the book, highlight Hammond’s use of the four aspects of contextual methodology of the U.S.-Israeli dialogue concerning Palestine.  A clear double standard and change of narrative exists concerning the determination of a state of Palestine as per entrance to UNESCO.

Then Secretary of State Clinton cautioned against recognizing a state without “determining what the state will look like, what its borders are, how it will deal with myriad issues that states must address” – none of which issues had prevented the U.S. sixty-three years earlier from recognizing the state of Israel only minutes [italics in original] after the Zionist leadership unilaterally declared its existence without borders and mostly on land they had no rights to.” (p. 369)  In fact they had no rights to any of the land other than the 5.8 per cent they actually owned as the UN Partition Plan was rejected by the Palestinians and had no power of international law.

Earlier in Hammond’s presentation (p. 354) the New York Times argued that “vetoing a statehood resolution “would intensify Arab perceptions of American double standards,” noting also “the president risks appearing hypocritical.”  A nice tidy way to identify double standards, manage perceptions, and manufacture consent for a narrative – in this case the idea being simply that it is not the fault of the U.S. but of Arab “perceptions.”

Obstacle to Peace is a lengthy and involved read, yet readily accessible.  It can and should serve as a reference work, a compendium of information on the Israel-Palestine conflict.  As for the initial structural reference, the chapters are clearly delineated and set out with clear subheadings.  The bibliography/reference section is extensive.  It also struck me that the words narrative, double standards, manufactured consent, manage perceptions are not listed in the very useful index – these contextual methodologies are so widespread throughout the book the marker would simply be passim.

The conclusion is simple, well supported by the precise examination of language and context: “the single greatest obstacle to a peaceful resolution: the criminal policies of the government of the United States of America.”

 Notes

[1] Michael Byers, War Law – Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, 2005. P. 3-4.

[2] ibid, p.5

[3] Some actions that may have become customary, such as pre-emptive war and the ‘right to protect’ syndrome have been abused by the U.S./NATO (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Kosovo/Serbia, Afghanistan)  and now are not considered to be a customary rule (i.e. not accepted by the majority of the world) basically as they were used as an excuse to invade and change governments in other countries who did not accept U.S. global hegemony.

The battle for Aleppo is heading to its turning point. Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, a new brand of the Al Nusra Front terrorist group, various jihadi faction and the Western-backed moderate oppositioners has set a joint front against the Syrian government forces, supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces and Iranian-backed Shia militias. They were pushed to make this move, which clearly showed there were only terrorists and terrorist-linked groups in Aleppo, because of successful actions of the Assad government and its Russian and Iranian allies that lead to encirclement of the militant-controlled areas of the city.

This and a threat of cessation of support through the Turkish border after August 9 meeting between Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdogan forced Jabhat Fateh al-Sham leadership and its allies to risk everything, redeploying all elite infantry in the battle for Aleppo and moving rear supply bases and command centres closer to the strategic city. The militants’ actions show that they the “all-or-nothing” approach.

Despite all PR claims of the West that the Assad government and its allies have to stop military operations, it’s clear that the intensification of military pressure on the terrorists storming Aleppo, including the usage of strategic bombers that have already been in action over Palmyra, is the most rational answer to the challenges faced there.

The Russian missile ships Tatarstan and Dagestan, which are scheduled to hold missile and artillery live-firing drills in the south-western part of the Caspian Sea, could also use Kalibr missile systems in order to destroy the jihadists’ command centers, training camps and rear bases in the Idlib and Aleppo countryside.

If the jihadists’ resistance is broken, pro-government forces will take control of the important logistic hub and put an end to the US-, Turkish- and Saudi-backed jihadists as a united force in Syria. It will create an opportunity to destroy the rest of terrorists and terrorist-linked groups, ignoring the PR statements that the so-called “moderate opposition” has forgotten to separate from them.

The Cold War began during the Truman administration and lasted through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations and was ended in Reagan’s second term when Reagan and Gorbachev came to an agreement that the conflict was dangerous, expensive, and pointless.

The Cold War did not cease for long—only from the last of Reagan’s second term and the four years of George H. W. Bush’s term. In the 1990s President Clinton restarted the Cold War by breaking America’s promise not to expend NATO into Eastern Europe. George W. Bush heated up the renewed Cold War by pulling the US out of the Anti-ABM Treaty, and Obama has made the war hotter with irresponsible rhetoric and by placing US missiles on Russia’s border and overthrowing the Ukrainian government.

The Cold War was a Washington creation. It was the work of the Dulles brothers. Allen was the head of the CIA, and John Foster was the Secretary of State, positions that they held for a long time. The brothers had a vested interest in the Cold War. They used the Cold War to protect the interests of their law firm’s clients, and they used it to enhance the power and budgets associated with their high positions in government. It is much more exciting to be in charge of foreign policy and covert activity in dangerous times.

Whenever a reformist democratic government appeared in Latin America the Dulles brothers saw it as a threat to the holdings that their law firm’s clients had in that country. These holdings, sometimes acquired with bribes to nondemocratic governments, diverted the country’s resources and wealth into American hands, and that is the way the Dulles brothers intended to keep it. The reformist government would be declared Marxist or Communist, and the CIA and State Department would work together to overthrow it and place back in power a dictator in bed with Washington.

The Cold War was pointless except for the Dulles brothers’ interests and those of the military/security complex. The Soviet government, unlike the US government today, had no world hegemonic asperations. Stalin had declared “Socialism in one country” and purged the Trotskyists, the advocates of world revolution. Communism in China and Eastern Europe were not products of Soviet international communism. Mao was his own man, and the Soviet Union kept Eastern Europe from which the Red Army drove out the Nazis as a buffer against a hostile West.

In those days the “Red scare” was used like the “Muslim terrorist scare” today—to force the public to go along with an agenda without debate or understanding. Consider the costly Vietnam war, for example. Ho Chi Minh was an anticolonist leading a nationalist movement. He was not an agent of international communism, but John Foster Dulles made him one and said that Ho must be stopped or the “domino theory” would result in the fall of all of Southeast Asia to communism. Vietnam won the war and did not launch the aggression that Dulles predicted against Southeast Asia.

Ho had pleaded with the US government for support against the French colonial power that ruled Indo-China. Rebuffed, Ho turned to Russia. If Washington had simply told the French government that the colonialist era was over and that France needed to vacate Indo-China, the disaster of the Vietnam war would have been avoided. But invented threats to serve interest groups had become hobgoblins then as now, and Washington, along with many others, became a victim of its imaginary monsters.

NATO was unnecessary as there was no danger of the Red Army sweeping into Western Europe. The Soviet government had enough trouble occupying Eastern Europe with its rebellous populations. The Soviet Union was faced with an uprising in East Germany in 1953, from Poland and Hungary in 1956, and from the Communist Party itself in Czechoslavia in 1968. The Soviet Union suffered enormous population loss in World War II and required its remaining manpower for post-war reconstruction. It was beyond Soviet ability to occupy Western Europe in addition to Eastern Europe. The French and Italian communist parties were strong in the post-war period, and Stalin had grounds for hope that a communist government in France or Italy would result in the breakup of Washington’s European empire. These hopes were dashed by Operation Gladio.

We had the Cold War because it served the Dulles brothers and the power and profits of the military/security complex. There were no other reasons for the Cold War.

The new Cold War is even more pointless than the first. Russia was cooperating with the West, and the Russian economy was integrated into the West as a supplier of raw materials. The neoliberal economic policy that Washington convinced the Russian government to implement was designed to keep the Russian economy in the role of supplier of raw materials to the West. Russia expressed no territorial ambitions and spent very little on its military.

The new Cold War is the work of a handful of neoconservative fanatics who believe that History has chosen the US to wield hegemonic power over the world. Some of the neocons are sons of former Trotskyists and have the same romantic notion of world revolution, only this time it is “democratic-capitalist” and not communist.

The new Cold War is far more dangerous than the old, because the respective war doctrines of the nuclear powers have changed. The function of nuclear weapons is no longer retaliatory. Mutually Assured Destruction was a guarantee that the weapons would not be used. In the new war doctrine nuclear weapons have been elevated to first-use in a preemptive nuclear attack. Washington first took this step, forcing Russia and China to follow.

The new Cold War is more dangerous for a second reason. During the first Cold War American presidents focused on reducing tensions between nuclear powers. But the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have raised tensions dramaticaly. William Perry, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton regime, recently spoke of the danger of nuclear war being launched by false alarms resulting from such things as faulty computer chips. Fortunately, when such instances occurred in the past, the absence of tension in the relationship between the nuclear powers caused authorities on both sides to disbelieve the false alarms. Today, however, with constant allegations of pending Russian invasions, Putin demonized as “the new Hitler,” and the buildup of US and NATO military forces on Russia’s borders, a false alarm becomes believable.

NATO lost its purpose when the Soviet Union collapsed. However, too many careers, budgets, and armaments profits depended on NATO. The neoconservatives seized on NATO as political cover and an auxillary military force for their hegemonic ambitions. The purpose of NATO today is to implicate all of Europe in Washington’s war crimes. Since all are guilty, European governments cannot turn on Washington and accuse the Americans of war crimes. Other voices are too weak to be of consequence. Despite its vast crimes against humanity, the West still retains the position of “a light unto the world,” a defender of truth, justice, human rights, democracy, and individual liberty. This reputation persists despite the destruction of the Bill of Rights and police state repression.

The West does not represent the values that the world has been brainwashed to believe are associated wirth the West. For example, there was no need to attack Japanese civilian cities with atomic weapons. Japan was trying to surrender and was holding out against the US demand for unconditional surrender only in order to spare the emperor from execution for war crimes over which he had no control. Like the British sovereign today, the emperor had no political power and was a symbol of national unity. Japan’s war leaders were fearful that Japanese unity would dissolve if the emperor, the symbol of unity, was removed. Of course, the Americans were too ignorant to understand the situation, and so, little Truman, bullied all his life as a nonentity, glorified in his power and dropped the bombs.

The atomic bombs dropped on Japan were powerful. However, the hydrogen bombs that have replaced them are far more powerful. The use of such weapons is inconsistent with life on Earth.

Donald Trump has said the only hopeful thing in the presidential campaign. He called into question NATO and the orchesrated conflict with Russia. We don’t know if we can believe him or whether his government would follow his direction. But we do know that Hitlery is a warmonger, an agent of the neoconservatives, the military-security complex, the Israel Lobby, the banks too big to fail, Wall Street, and every foreign interest that will make a mega-million dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation or a quarter million dollar fee for a speech.

Hitlery [Hillary Clinton] declared the President of Russia to be the Ultimate Threat—“the new Hitler.”

Could it be any more clear? A vote for Hitlery is a vote for war. Despite this most obvious of all facts, the US media, united as one, are doing everything in their power to drive Trump into the ground and to elect Hitlery.

What does this tell us about the intelligence of the “Unipower,” “the world’s only superpower,” the” indispensible people,” the “exceptional nation”? It tells us that they are as dumb as shit. Creatures of The Matrix created by their own propagandists, Americans see imaginary threats, not real ones.

What the Russians and Chinese see are a people too brainwashed and ignorant to be of any support for peace. They see war coming and are preparing for it.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

Outside significant mainstream media coverage, Britain is stepping up its support for the dictatorships in the Arabian Gulf and its ability to conduct military interventions in the Middle East. The strategy is illustrated in Whitehall’s long-standing but ignored special relationship Whitehall with Oman, the secretive, oil-rich Gulf state run by a despot installed in a British coup as long ago as 1970.

Oman is a British client state welcoming major British intelligence and military operations whose principal economic asset – oil – is controlled by Anglo-Dutch company, Shell. Files leaked by Edward Snowden show that Britain has a network of three GCHQ spy bases in Oman – codenamed ‘Timpani’, ‘Guitar’ and ‘Clarinet’ – which tap in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Arabian Gulf. These bases intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic, which information is then shared with the National Security Agency in the United States.

The British government announced in March this year that it is developing a large new military base – described as a ‘strategic port’ – at the Duqm Port complex in central Oman. This will house the two 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers being built for the Royal Navy, and other navy ships, with the aim clearly being to better project power in the region. The base is described as enabling a ‘permanent’ British naval presence in the area. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon hassaid that the port ‘will offer an airport with a 4km runway close to a port large enough for a Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers to manoeuvre and will also be connected to other Gulf countries by the Gulf Rail Project’.

The new Omani base will sit alongside another new intervention platform in the region – the British military base being built at Mina Salman port in Bahrain, another long-standing British ally ruled by a brutally repressive state. Bahrain already houses the largest permanent detachment of the Royal Navy outside the UK as part of the ‘Combined Maritime Force’, which includes the US Navy 5th Fleet in Manama. Together, these bases will provide the UK with its largest military intervention capability in the region since the late 1960s, when some bases in the region were closed.

British leaders claim these bases will provide security and stability for the region. The reality is that their most strategic significance, aside from being able to conduct military strikes, is in guarding oil routes – Oman plays an important role in overseeing the passage of international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 30 per cent of globally bound oil passes every day. The British oil stake in Oman is already huge: Shell has a 34 per cent interest (alongside the government’s 60 per cent) in the Petroleum Development Corporation which manages the country’s oil.

Oman is described by the government as ‘a longstanding British ally… with shared interests across diplomatic, economic and security matters’. The UK and Omani armed forces regularly train together and this May, the two countriessigned a new military Memorandum of Understanding in which Britain’s armed forces plan to deploy 45 training teams to Oman in 2016. As part of this relationship, Oman naturally buys a lot of British weapons – most recently, a £2.5 billion deal agreed in 2013 to purchase 20 Typhoon and Hawk aircraft following a visit by David Cameron. ‘The Typhoon fighter jet performed outstandingly in Libya’, the government’s press release at the time stated, referring to the British military intervention in that country that helped to plunge it into anarchy and civil war.

In recent years British defence secretaries, members of the Royal Family, Lord Mayors of London and heads of military and oil companies have all been streaming into Oman, with practically no attention paid whatsoever by the 24 hour British media. They routinely deliver extreme apologias for the nature of the Omani regime, and especially its leader, Sultan Qaboos. In February 2014, for example, then Foreign Office Minister Baroness Warsi, delivering a speech in Muscat, praised ‘the Sultan’s wise leadership’ while Chris Breeze, the Oman country chairman of has noted the ‘Sultan Qaboos bin Said’s clear and inspirational vision for Oman’.

By contrast, Khalfan al-Badwawi, an Omani human rights campaigner who fled the country in 2013 after being repeatedly detained by police, recently told Middle East Eyethat the high level of British military and diplomatic assistance for the Omani government was ‘a major obstacle to human rights campaigners in Oman because of the military and intelligence support from London that props up the Sultan’s dictatorship’.

Whilst Oman’s repression is not as far-reaching or brutal as that in other UK-backed regimes in the region – notably Bahrain and Egypt – it remains serious and deep. According to Human Rights Watch:

Oman’s overly broad laws restrict the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association. The authorities target peaceful activists, pro-reform bloggers, and government critics using short term arrests and detentions and other forms of harassment. Some detainees arrested since 2011 have alleg…

An especially odious feature of Oman’s political system is that all public gatherings require advance official approval while the authorities arrest and prosecute participants in unapproved gatherings.

Sultan Qaboos is well and truly Britain’s man in the Gulf. One of the longest serving dictators in the world, he was installed in power in a British-organised coup in 1970. British declassified files show that British military advisers in Oman, including the SAS, organised the overthrow of Qaboos’ father. Qaboos served in the British army and attended the army training college at Sandhurst and the RAF officers’ college at Cranwell.

By retaining faith in repressive pro-Western leaders in the region, backing them to the hilt, supplying them with arms and using their territory to militarily intervene in the region, Britain is continuing its long standing Middle East policy, backed by the US. With the region on fire virtually everywhere from Libya to Afghanistan, it is as though British leaders simply want to repeat all the counter-productive and immoral episodes of the past while simply stirring up even more war and instability in these areas. In fact, this view seems about right, judged by current policies. It really is time that British journalists find out where Oman is on the map and highlight what their country is actually doing there.

Follow Mark Curtis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markcurtis30

There is an ugly anti-Russian mood in various Rio Olympic venues. When the Russian swimmers entered the pool for the 4 x 100M Freestyle team event, they were loudly booed. When the Russian team barely lost 3^rd place, the announcer happily announced that Russian had been “kept off the medal stand”.

Last Sunday it was announced that the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) had decided to ban the entire Russian team from the upcoming Paralympics to held in Rio in September. Thus, 267 mentally or physically disabled Russians who have been preparing for the Rio Paralympics for years are now banned from competing. On Monday Associated Press story opened as follows: “After escaping a blanket ban from the Olympics, Russia was kicked out of the upcoming Paralympics on Sunday as the ultimate punishment for the state running a doping operation that polluted sports by prioritizing “medals over morals”.

In this article I will show how some big accusations based on little evidence have contributed to discrimination against clean Russian athletes and fostered a dangerous animosity contrary to the intended spirit of the Olympics.

International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Attack

The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) made their decision to ban all 267 Russian Paralympic athletes largely on the basis of WADA’s July 16 McLaren Report and private communications with McLaren.

IPC President Sir Phillip Craven issued a statement full of accusations and moral outrage. He says “In my view, the McLaren Report marked one of the darkest days in the history of all sport.”

However, the McLaren Report is deeply biased. Here are some of the problems with the report:

* It relied primarily on the testimony of one person, the former Director of Moscow Laboratory Grigory Rodchenkov, who was implicated in extorting Russian athletes for money and was the chief culprit with strong interest in casting blame somewhere else.

* It accused Russian authorities without considering their defense and contrary information.

* It excluded a written submission and documents provided by a Russian authority.

* It failed to identify individual athletes who benefited but instead cast suspicion on the entire team.

* It ignored the statistical data compiled by WADA which show Russian violations to be NOT exceptional.

* It did not provide the source for quantitative measurements.

* It claimed to have evidence but failed to reveal it.

A detailed critique of the McLaren Report can be found at Sports Integrity Initiative, Consortiumnews, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, True Publica, Global Research, Telesur, and other sites.

The IPC explanation of why they banned the entire 267 person Paralympic team boils down to the accusation that “the State-sponsored doping programme that exists within Russian sport regrettably extends to Russian Para sport as well. The facts really do hurt; they are an unprecedented attack on every clean athlete who competes in sport. The anti-doping system in Russia is broken, corrupted and entirely compromised….. The doping culture that is polluting Russian sport stems from the Russian government and has now been uncovered in not one, but two independent reports commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency….. I believe the Russian government has catastrophically failed its Para athletes. Their medals over morals mentality disgusts me. The complete corruption of the anti-doping system is contrary to the rules and strikes at the very heart of the spirit of Paralympic sport.”

These are strong words and accusations, not against the athletes, but against the Russian government. It seems the Russian Paralympic athletes are being collectively punished as a means to punish the Russian government.

But what are the facts? First, it’s true some Russian athletes have used prohibited steroids or other performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). The documentaries by Hajo Seppelt expose examples of Russian athletes admitting to taking PEDs, a banned coach clandestinely continuing to coach, and another banned coach dealing in prohibited drugs.

Another fact is that this problem exists in many if not all countries, especially since professional athletics is big business. WADA data shows that many countries have significant numbers of doping violations.

It is claimed that doping by elite athletes is pervasive in Russia but is this true? To answer that accurately would require an objective examination not a sensation seeking media report. In the current controversy the accusations and assumptions rely substantially on individual anecdotes and testimony which has been publicized through media reports (ARD documentaries, Sixty Minutes report and NY Times stories) with very little scrutiny. In contrast with the accusations , the scientific data prepared by WADA indicates that Russian athletes have a fairly low incidence of positive drug tests in international certified laboratories.

The biggest question is whether the Russian government has been “sponsoring” or somehow supervising prohibited doping. This has been repeated many times and is now widely assumed to be true. However the evidence is far from compelling. The accusations are based primarily on the testimony of three people: the main culprit and mastermind Grigory Rodchenkov who was extorting athletes and “whistle-blowers” Vitaliy and Yuliya Stepanov. The Stepanovs were the star witnesses in the Sixty Minutes feature on this topic. The report was factually flawed: it mistakenly reports that Vitaliy had a “low level job at the Russian Anti Doping Agency RUSADA”. Actually he was adviser to the Director General, close to the Minister of Sports and a trainer of doping control officers. The Sixty Minutes story also failed to include the important fact that Vitaliy was directly involved in his wife’s doping. According to Seppelt’s documentary “The Secrets of Doping” “First, Vitaliy even helps his wife with doping, procures the drugs, leads a kind of double life.”(5:45) Adding to the argument there may be a political bias in these accusations, all three witnesses (Rodchenkov and the Stepanovs) are now living in the USA.

The “proof” of Russian state sponsored doping rests on remarkably little solid evidence. The principal assertion is that the Deputy Minister of Sports issued email directives to eliminate positive tests of “protected” athletes. McLaren claims to have “electronic data” and emails proving this. However he has not revealed the emails. If the emails are authentic, that would be damning. How would the Ministry of Sports officials explain it? Do they have any alternative explanation of the curious directives to “Quarantine” or “Save” doping test samples? Astoundingly, McLaren decided not to ask them and he still has not shown the evidence he has.

Another controversial issue is regarding the opening and replacement of “tamper proof” bottles. The Rodchenkov account is that in the middle of the night, in cahoots with FSB (successor to KGB), they would replace “dirty” urine with “clean” urine. Rodchenkov says they found a way to open the tamper proof urine sample bottles. However the Swiss manufacturer Berlinger continues to stand by its product and has effectively challenged the veracity of the Rodchenkov/McLaren story. Since the release of the McLaren Report, Berlinger has issued a statement saying:

• To the statement in the McLaren investigation report that some such bottles proved possible to open Berlinger Special AG cannot offer any authoritative response at the present time.
• Berlinger Special AG has no knowledge at present of the specifications, the methods or the procedures involved in the tests and experiments conducted by the McLaren Commission.
• Berlinger Special AG conducts its own regular reappraisals of its doping kits, and also has its products tested and verified by an independent institute that has been duly certificated by the Swiss authorities.
• In neither its own tests nor any tests conducted by the independent institute in Switzerland has any sealed Berlinger Special AG urine sample bottle proved possible to open.
• This also applies to the “Sochi 2014” sample bottle model.
• The specialists at Berlinger Special AG are able at any time to determine whether one of the company’s sample bottles has been tampered with or unlawfully replicated.

McLaren says he does not know how the Russians were opening the bottles but he knows it can be done because someone demonstrated it to him personally. In contrast with McLaren’s assertions, Berlinger states unequivocally “In neither its own tests nor any tests conducted by the independent institute in Switzerland has any sealed Berlinger Special AG urine sample bottle proved possible to open. This also applies to the ‘Sochi 2014’ sample bottle model.”

If McLaren’s claims are true, why has he not discussed this with the manufacturer? Isn’t it important to identify the weakness in the system so that doping test samples cannot continue to be swapped as alleged? If his objective is to honestly find the facts, prevent cheating and improve the testing for doping violations, surely he should be consulting closely the certified and longstanding bottle manufacturer. The fact that McLaren has apparently not pursued this with the manufacturer raises legitimate questions about his claims, sincerity and “independence”.

McLaren further claims to be able to forensically determine when a ‘tamper proof’ bottle has been opened by the “marks and scratches” on the inside of the bottle caps. His report does not include photos to show what these “marks and scratches” look like, nor does it consider the possibility of a mark or scratch resulting from some other event such as different force being applied, cross-threading or backing off on the cap. In this area also, McLaren has apparently not had his findings confirmed by the Swiss manufacturer despite the fact they state “The specialists at Berlinger Special AG are able at any time to determine whether one of the company’s sample bottles has been tampered with or unlawfully replicated.”

If the findings of McLaren’s “marks and scratches expert” are accurate, why did they not get confirmation from the specialists at Berlinger? Perhaps it is because Berlinger disputes McLaren’s claims and says “Our kits are secure”.

The IPC decision substantially rests on the fact-challenged McLaren report. The IPC statement falsely claims that the McLaren bottle top “scratches and marks” expert has “corroborated the claim that the State directed scheme involved Russian Paralympic athletes.”

Banning 267 Athletes instead of the Guilty Eleven

The IPC report includes data that purports to show widespread doping manipulation in Russia. They report “Professor McLaren provided the names of the athletes associated with the 35 samples ….and whether the sample had been marked QUARANTINE or SAVE.” These 35 samples are presumably the same Paralympic 35 which are identified on page 41 of the McLaren Report as being “Disappearing Positive Test Results by Sport Russian Athletes”. There is no source for this data but supposedly it covers testing between 2012 and 2015. McLaren provided another 10 samples thus making 45 samples relating to 44 athletes.

It is then explained that 17 of these samples are actually not from IPC administered sport. So the actual number is 27 athletes (44 – 17) implicated. However, in another inconsistency, the IPC statement says not all these samples were marked “SAVE” by Moscow Laboratory. That was only done for “at least” 11 of the samples and athletes.

If the IPC final number is accurate it means they confirmed eleven Paralympic athletes who tested positive between 2012 and 2015 but had their positive tests “disappeared” to allow these athletes to compete. These athletes should be suspended or banned. Instead of doing that, the IPC banned the entire 267 person Russian Paralympic team!

The Rush to Judgment

The McLaren Report looks like a rush to judgment. The report was launched after the sensational NY Times story based on Grigory Rodchenkov and Sixty Minutes story based on the Stepanovs. Before he was half way done his investigation, Richard McLaren was already advising the IAAF to ban the entire Russian team. The McLaren Report, with all its flaws and shortcomings, was published just a few weeks ago on 16 July 2016. Then, on August 7, the IPC issued its decision to ban the Russian Paralympic Team from the September Rio Paralympics.

The IPC statement claims that they “provided sufficient time to allow the Russian Paralympic Committee to present their case to the IPC” before they finalized the decision. While the Russian Paralympic Committee appeared before the IPC, it’s doubtful they had sufficient time to argue their case or even to know the details of the accusations.

In summary, the accusation of Russian ‘state sponsored doping’ by McLaren and Craven is based on little solid evidence. Despite this, the accusations have resulted in the banning of many hundreds of clean athletes from the Olympics and Paralympics. They have also contributed to the ugly “ant-Russian” prejudice and discrimination happening at the Olympics right now. This seems to violate the purpose of the Olympics movement which is to promote international peace not conflict and discrimination.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist.

He can be contacted at [email protected]

On August 11th, 2016, all major fronts around the city of Aleppo experienced a flurry of activity.

In northern Aleppo, Fatah Halab fired Lava and Elephant rockets on pro-government positions within al-Mallah farms. Jaish al-Tahrir used mortars to harass Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Iraqi militia troops along the Castello Road Front.

In southern Aleppo, four separate groups of terrorists launched attacks on government positions. Jaish al-Nasr, Ahrar al-Sham, Faylaq al-Sham and the Bayan Movement managed to capture the Mahmiyat al-Ghizlan camp situated in the Khanaser Plain. The so-called Mountain Hawks Brigade operating on the Sabfiya front in southern Aleppo, uploaded footage of a TOW missile attack against a government outpost. Terrorist gains in this region threaten crucial supply lines to pro-government positions attempting to maintain a perimeter around the city center.

Pro-government forces pushed back when Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) troops made a push in the countryside of southern Aleppo. However, no strategically significant ground was secured.

In western Aleppo, Russian precision air strikes hammered the 1070 Housing Project, a hotbed of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham activity. The results of the strike are seen to good effect in footage shot from a rebel technical that narrowly escaped destruction.

The Syrian Arab Army was out in force around the southern reaches of Aleppo, with evidence indicating the deployment of a T-72M1 equipped with the Sarab-1 Jammer. In addition, a T-62 and assorted artillery were used to pound the terrorist positions outside Aleppo.

The first recorded death toll, from the Palestinian militia group ‘Al-Quds,’ was released after pitched battles around the Ramouseh Roundabout, in western Aleppo. Nine militia members died fighting on behalf of the pro-Government cause.  The Jaish al-Fatah operation room cannot supply its allied militants in eastern Aleppo on a constant basis because the group does not control this strategic roundabout and the Ramouseh Garage. The road on Khan Touman is also on the scene of fighting with the Syrian government forces.

In the skies over Ramouseh, a Syrian Arab Army drone was shot down.

Away from Aleppo, the Syrian Democratic Forces reported 230 terrorists killed in a failed Islamic State offensive to break the Siege of Manbij along the Jarabulus Front. So-called democratic forces also recorded the capture of an Islamic State religious police headquarters in Manbij city.

Today, August 13, 2016 it is the 90th birthday of Fidel Castro Ruz, leader of the Cuban Revolution.

This article was first published by Global Research on August 13, 2011.

The Global Research team extends its warm greetings and best wishes to Comandante Fidel. 

Our “wish-list” to Comandante Fidel Castro on his 90th Birthday is:

For a World of Peace,

For a World of Truth, where people Worldwide join hands,

For a World of understanding, a World of tolerance and respect,

For the concurrent demise of neoliberalism and militarization which destroy people’s lives,

For the outright criminalization of America’s imperial wars,

For a World of Social Justice with a true “responsibility to protect” our fellow human beings,

For Truth in Media. For a World in which journalists are committed to reporting the truth,

Happy Birthday Comandante Fidel,  

You are the source of tremendous inspiration. Our thoughts are with you.

Long Live Fidel Castro Ruz

*      *      *

Fidel Castro under arrest in July 1953 after the Moncada attack (right).

Fidel Castro Ruz at the United Nations General Assembly in 1960 (left)

At the height of a US sponsored war and Worldwide economic crisis, Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban revolution, who to this day defies America’s imperial design, remains a source of hope and inspiration to those committed to social justice and international solidarity.

Last October [2010], I had the opportunity of spending several days at Fidel Castro`s home in the suburbs of Havana. Our conversation and exchange focussed on the dangers of nuclear war.

I had read Fidel Castro and Che Guevara during my high school days in Geneva, Switzerland and later at university in Britain and the US. When meeting him in person, I discovered a man of tremendous integrity, with an acute mind and sense of humor, committed in the minute detail of his speech to social progress and the advancement of humankind, conscious of the dangers of the US led war and the Worldwide crisis, with exceptional skills of analysis and understanding of his fellow human beings, with a true sprit of internationalism and a tremendous knowledge of history, economics and geopolitics.

On a daily basis, Fidel spends several hours reading a large number of detailed international press reports (As he mentioned to me with a smile, “I frequently consult articles from the Global Research website”…).

We focussed in large part on the dangers of nuclear war. Fidel Castro has the knack of addressing political details while relating them to key concepts. We also covered numerous complex international issues, focussing on the role of prominent political personalities, heads of State, authors and intellectuals. On the first day, when I met Fidel at his home, he was reading Bob Woodward’s best-seller The Obama Wars which had just been released. (See Picture below).

In this broad exchange of ideas, Fidel was invariably assertive in his views but at the same time respectful of those whom he condemned or criticized, particularly when discussing US presidential politics.

Fidel is acutely aware of the mechanisms of media disinformation and war propaganda and how they are used to undermine civil rights and social progress, not to mention the smear campaign directed against the Cuban revolution.

A central concept put forth by Fidel Castro in our discussions was the ‘Battle of Ideas”.  The leader of the Cuban Revolution believes that only a far-reaching “Battle of Ideas” can change the course of World history.

In addressing and understanding this Worldwide crisis, commitment to the Truth and analysis of the lies and fabrications which sustain the corporate and financial elites is of utmost importance.

The overriding powers of the Truth can, under appropriate conditions, be used as a revolutionary instrument, as a catalyst to unseat the war criminals in high office, whose role and position is sustained by propaganda and media disinformation.

In relation to 9/11, Fidel  had expressed his solidarity, on behalf of the Cuban people, with the victims of the tragic events of September 11 2001, while underscoring the lies and fabrications behind the official 9/11 narrative and how 9/11 has been used as a pretext to wage war.

Our focus was on nuclear war, which since our meeting last October has motivated me to write a book on the Dangers of Nuclear War. (Michel Chossudovsky, Towards a World War III Scenario. Global Research, Montreal, 2011)

The corporate media is involved in acts of camouflage. The devastating impacts of a nuclear war are either trivialized or not mentioned. Against this backdrop, Fidel’s message to the World must be heard; people across the land, nationally and internationally, should understand the gravity of the present situation and act forcefully at all levels of society to reverse the tide of war.

The “Battle of Ideas” is part of a revolutionary process. Against a barrage of media disinformation, Fidel Castro’s resolve is to spread the word far and wide, to inform world public opinion, to “make the impossible possible”, to thwart a military adventure which in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity.

When a US sponsored nuclear war becomes an “instrument of peace”, a “responsibility to protect” condoned and accepted by the World’s institutions and the highest authority including the United Nations, there is no turning back:  human society has indelibly been precipitated headlong onto the path of self-destruction.

Fidel Castro Ruz, October 15, 2010

Fidel’s “Battle of Ideas” must be translated into a worldwide movement. People must mobilize against this diabolical military agenda.

This war can be prevented if people pressure their governments and elected representatives, organize at the local level in towns, villages and municipalities, spread the word, inform their fellow citizens regarding the implications of a thermonuclear war, initiate debate and discussion within the armed forces.

What is required is a mass movement of people which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of war, a global people’s movement which criminalizes war.

In his October 15, 2010 speech, Fidel Castro warned the World on the dangers of nuclear war:

“There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people. In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.

Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!”

The “Battle of Ideas” consists in confronting the war criminals in high office, in breaking the US-led consensus in favor of a global war, in changing the mindset of hundreds of millions of people, in abolishing nuclear weapons. In essence, the “Battle of Ideas” consists in restoring the truth and establishing the foundations of World peace.

“The Battle of Ideas” must be developed as a mass movement, nationally and internationally, waged by people across the land.

Fidel Castro Ruz has indelibly marked the history of both the Twentieth and Twenty-first Century.

Below is the transcript and video of Fidel’s historic October 15 2010 speech focussing on the dangers of a nuclear war, recorded by Global Research and Cuba Debate in his home in Havana in October 2010.

The American and European media in October 2010 decided in chorus not to acknowledge or even comment on Fidel Castro’s October 15, 2010 speech on the Dangers of Nuclear War. The evolving media consensus is that neither nuclear war nor nuclear energy constitute a threat to “the surrounding civilian population”.

Michel Chossudovsky, on behalf of  the Global Research Team, Montreal, August 13, 2016 

Fidel Castro’s October 15, 2010 Message on the Dangers of Nuclear War

The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was candidly foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted the development of this weapon so that it would not become available to the genocidal Nazi regime.

Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the peoples on the planet.

Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.

The World’s peoples have an obligation to demand of their political leaders their Right to Live. When the life of humankind, of your people and your most beloved human beings run such a risk, nobody can afford to be indifferent; not one minute can be lost in demanding respect for that right; tomorrow will be too late.

Albert Einstein himself stated unmistakably: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. We fully comprehend what he wanted to convey, and he was absolutely right, yet in the wake of a global nuclear war, there wouldn’t be anybody around to make use of those sticks and stones.

There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people.

In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.

Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!

Fidel Castro Ruz

October 15, 2010

The following pictures wer taken after the filming of Fidel’s speech against Nuclear war, October 15, 2010 . Below is a Toast to World Peace.

Left to Right. Fidel Castro, Film Crew, Michel Chossudovsky, Randy Alonso Falcon

From Right to Left: Fidel Castro Ruz, Dalia Soto del Valle, Michel Chossudovsky. A Toast for World Peace.

From Right to Left: Fidel Castro Ruz, Dalia Soto del Valle, Alexis Castro Soto del Valle, Randy Alonso Falcon and Michel Chossudovsky (Left)

Right to Left: Fidel Castro Ruz, Randy Alonso Falcon, Michel Chossudovsky, October 15, 2010. Copyright Global Research 2010

Photos: Copyright Global Research 2010

Race, Class and Justice in America

By Abayomi Azikiwe, August 12 2016

How can the treatment of people in major metropolitan industrial and service-centered areas be allowed to deteriorate to such a degree without high level officials being held accountable by fellow politicians and the courts? Where does the federal government step in to ostensibly protect the “civil rights” of ordinary residents from the tyranny of their local governments and private corporations? The wealthiest people within society are excused from paying adequate taxes and are allowed to expropriate the working people and poor, many of whom are Black and Brown.

The Flagging Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement: The US Election and Free Trade Politics

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 12 2016

Being savaged by Donald J. Trump on one side of the electoral aisle, and modestly beaten by the Democratic presumptive candidate, Hillary Clinton, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is lying somewhere between near death and miraculous survival. Those breathing life into that unfortunate beast remain politicians who embraced the mythology of free trade while never questioning what was free.

Hilary Clinton – History Repeats Itself?

By Andre Vltchek, August 12 2016

Once upon a time, there was a man called James Buchanan. He was a Democrat, a Secretary of State and then the President of the United States. A good friend of mine, a historian, told me about him. Buchanan was the last U.S. President who previously served as Secretary of State. He was a Pennsylvania native, and he took his place in the Oval Office in 1857. Now, more than 150 years later, Hilary Clinton may be about to follow in his footsteps. And some footsteps they were!

Operation Mockingbird 2.0? Former CIA Director Planting Conspiracy Theories: Trump is an “Unwitting” Russian Agent

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, August 12 2016

Are we are now experiencing Operation Mockingbird 2.0? The CIA has been collaborating with the Mainstream Media (MSM) for some time is now selling one of the most ridiculous “Conspiracy Theories” in recent years (Obama’s “I killed Osama Bin Laden” Hoax tops the list). Former CIA director, Michael J. Morell has claimed that the Republican presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump is an “Unwitting Agent” of Russia. Another lie or what we can call a “real conspiracy theory” is that Russia hacked into the DNC servers and obtained emails that exposed corruption within the Democratic Party with no evidence whatsoever which I will discuss shortly.

The ICTY Karadzic Judgement and Milosevic: Victims of “Fascist Justice”

By Christopher Black, August 12 2016

A recent report by Andy Wilcoxson, who has been following the trials at the ICTY, states that the judgement in the Dr. Karadzic case, issued in March of this year, “exonerated” or cleared President Milosevic of the allegations made against him by the prosecution at the ICTY. However, the judgement contains other findings by these judges that muddy the waters and remind us that though they did accept certain favourable facts regarding Milosevic, their purpose was not to “clear” Milosevic but to convict Karadzic and so they used legitimate disagreements on strategy and tactics between Milosevic and Karadzic to diminish the role of Milosevic in this case and exaggerate the role of and belligerency of Karadzic.

Tensions Rise between Russia and Ukraine after Terrorist Provocation

By Bill Van Auken, August 12 2016

The Western-backed regime in Ukraine announced Thursday that it was placing its military forces on the highest state of combat alert amid the ratcheting up of tensions with Russia in the wake of a reported terrorist provocation in Russian-ruled Crimea. For its part, Moscow announced the staging of maneuvers in the Black Sea, with the Russian navy rehearsing tactics for the repulsion of a attack on Crimea.